A billion requests-per-day is not much actually. 1B / (24h * 60m * 60s) = 11.5K qps Let's say 2:1 between daily peak and trough, and call that 23K qps peak. 1

A billion requests-per-day is not much actually. 1B / (24h * 60m * 60s) = 11.5K qps Let's say 2:1 between daily peak and trough, and call that 23K qps peak. 10 years ago a single server could do 30Kqps of DNS: https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/shared/DNS_performance.pdf https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/shared/DNS_performance... So ~40 boxes 10 years ago would have been able to handle 60 billion queries per day. I'd expect a single modern server of reasonable size to easily do 100K qps, and probably more like 200-300K qps, if not exceeding a million qps (though a single box may hit the packet/s bottleneck). So Verisign is complaining about a single digit to low double digit server box worth of traffic. I have a hard time imagining this being more than a rounding error for them. EDIT: Updated to directly reflect 60B queries per day figure.