Feb 8 (Reuters) - Verisign reported a 3% rise its fourth-quarter revenue on Thursday, beating market estimates, on strong demand for its internet services that include registering domain names.

With more and more consumers turning to the internet as their first point of contact for businesses and services, companies and smaller enterprises have been boosting their online presence with easy-to-remember domain names.

Verisign said on Thursday it will hike the annual registry-level wholesale fee for new registrations and renewable of .com domains from $9.59 to $10.26, effective Sept. 1.

Excluding items, the domain name registry services provider reported profit of $1.92 per share in the December quarter, compared with analysts' average estimate of $1.86 per share, according to LSEG data.

At the end of the fourth quarter, Verisign registered 172.7 million .com and .net domain names, together down 0.6% from a year earlier.

Revenue for the last three months of the year stood at $380.4 million, compared with analysts' estimate of $377.9 million. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Shilpi Majumdar)