January 2000

Update: Romania

The number of web sites is steadily growing. From these, a significant trend is that of the websites in the educational area (primary, secondary and high schools as well as universities).

From the combined statistics from www.ripe.net and of www.rnc.ro (National Romanian Computer Network which act as IP provider for the RO domain) we can observe a constant rate between the number of web servers and domain numbers for the last four months. This means that our observations are close to the real figures.

We can represent the Romanian Web Sites evolution according to the ESIS WWW categories in the following graphic:

We believe that important parameters that we have to underline are: the evolution of the total number of web server and the unavailable sites. This evolution is presented below:

- According to www.ripe.net , the total number of DNS hosts counted in Romania from July 1999 to December 1999 increased from 3027 to 4021

In the table bellow, we can see the evolution of the Romanian hosts on a month-by-month basis.

The terms SOA, COUNTED DUPL, REAL, CHANGE are explained at the end of report.

During the month of December, ESIS II ROMANIA team, as a process of direct interrogation and classification of the web sites obtained these figures.

(*) IMT-Bucharest

Notes:

• The classification process is in development and in the future we plan to obtain a web-based feedback from the site administrators to help position each one in the right category.

• We used the http://ftp.rnc.ro/cgi-bin/webhosts.ro page from December 1^st 1999 as a source for web hosts in .ro domain (page Made by Andrei Petrescu). The page contains only web servers whose names start with www. There are also some other web servers, but we believe that their number will not affect our statistics too much.
  
• We visited 4357 sites, we found 2235 commercial / other category sites, 1621 sites did not respond and 501 were not defined yet.

• For the classification project ESIS II Romania team designed a Microsoft Access tool that contains several tables including the www addresses, the classifications criteria, etc. Supplementary, a form for the classification process was developed.

Briefly, the form used for the classification process is described below:

We can observe the website column, the webmaster column and the first category for web sites. An example of the classification categories we can see in the combo box opened in the second category column. We consider that a site can belong to several ESIS category and this is why we introduced three types of category per web site. There is also an observation column.

The terms SOA, COUNTED DUPL, REAL, CHANGE are explained below:

• SOA the number of delegated domains (zones) found below this top-level domain. In short this will be the number of subdomains below this top-level domain that run a separate nameserver.
• COUNTED the number of hosts (machines) found under this top level domain Hosts like "loopback", "localhost" etc are excluded from this number (in DNS terms, only A records are examined).
• DUPL the number of duplicate hosts (machines) found under this top-level domain. These are hosts that appear with more than one name, but with the same address (CNAME records are skipped automatically, and do not fall into this category)
• REAL the COUNTED number of machines minus the DUPL number of machines
• CHANGE change of the REAL count for this top level domain compared to the previous count (counts are usually performed once a month, at the end of each month, therefore this figure represents the increase over the last month)