With so much talks revolving around recession and everything being blamed on it, I would like to know to what extent has recession really affected the domain market and other complimentary services. I have gone through a lot of articles on the net but could not derive anything concrete out of it. Broadly speaking, there are two point of views to it. Firstly, internet businesses are going to prosper despite recession as internet is a cheaper medium of advertising and making an online presence for any size of business turns out to be very cheap. So more and more businesses will look upon internet to promote their businesses.
Secondly, due to recession not many new businesses are coming up and therefore the number of new websites has dropped. Also, lesser number of E-commerce websites coming up would also mean lesser number of digital certificates being sold. If anyone can provide some hard facts relating to recession and how it has affected domain registrations/renewals, hosting services, digital certificates etc. it will be really helpful.

Resellers of our system report to us that they have had a 30% drop in domainname and hosting orders since november 2008. We are located in The Netherlands, the resellers I am talking about are local. These are new orders, not existing customers that are dropping domains. It is probably caused by customers considering every euro that they are spending twice.

There is no point setting up a new business right now when the economy is in such bad shape and consumers are reluctant to buy anything.

I think there certainly are opportunities for new businessess.
People right now want to save money, so a timesaving and cost saving solution will have chances to be succesfull, even now.

There is no point setting up a new business right now when the economy is in such bad shape and consumers are reluctant to buy anything.
there is ALWAYS room for new business regardless of the economy.
while you're saying it can't be done, somebody else is adapting to the needs of their clients within the challenges of operating in this economy.

As is is shown by life the global economical slow down has almost no impact on online business!