If you own a business, your goal is to be wildly successful. You might look at financial growth, operational efficiencies or customer satisfaction, but at the end of the day, you want to execute on your vision to continue it. With SoftLayer’s management team, company culture, innovative platform and focus on the customer experience, we’ve managed to become a phenomenally successful and fast-growing company.

I run the Market Intelligence group at SoftLayer, and my team is responsible for reviewing success metrics internally and in comparison with many of our competitors. We have a wealth of data at our fingertips, and one of the most interesting statistics I track is related to market switching data.

Today, I was looking closely at some of our most recent domain name data, and I came across some pretty amazing information. We have millions of data points instantly available for filtering and sorting, so we can produce some pretty insightful market intelligence that can help us make better business and customer decisions.

While reviewing that domain name information, I did a quick pivot exercise in Excel to see the number of domain names hosted by SoftLayer – not just DNS hosted by us, but a pretty comprehensive view of the number of domains hosted on our infrastructure. As of March 1, 2011, we had 19,164,117 domains. Yes, you read that correctly: More than 19 million domains are hosted by SoftLayer. To give that a little context, the total domain name pool was 282,602,796, so we hosts about 6.78% of all domain names on the Internet.

That’s impressive, but it’s not the end of the story.

The number of net new domains coming to SoftLayer on a monthly basis is even more remarkable … From October 2010 to March 2011 – a 6 month snapshot – the total number of domains hosted on SoftLayer infrastructure had compounded growth of 124%:

What will the next six months hold? You can bet I’ll be refreshing the data to keep an eye on it. Without extrapolating much other information, I’d say that the growth numbers are astounding and they’re indicative of an unwavering confidence from our customers.

-Todd