WS Domain Registration

The story of the .ws domain extension begins with Michael Reed and Alan Ezeir the CEO’s and founders of GDI or Global Domains International which is the company responsible for registering the .ws extension. Michael and Alan were looking for an alternative that businesses could use as an alternative to the widely popular .com extension that exploded throughout the 1990’s.Both Michael and Alan took a look into country assigned domain extensions that are assigned by the IANA or Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. They are codes that are given to countries to use for the Internet such as .us for the USA or .au for Australia. They were searching for a country code that could be marketed globally as a popular alternative to the very well known .com extension.After much research they decided to focus all of their efforts on the tiny island of Samoa which is located in the deep South Pacific. With only a population of less than 200,000 people, the .ws domain was not used on a large scale and it seemed to be the perfect domain to market as the top level domain of websites. The .ws domain had the perfect branding power and appeal to do this with.Michael and Alan now had their plan laid out and set off on a trip to Samoa to negotiate contracts with the government and of Samoa. After many meetings they were convinced that they had them sold, but after going back to the states they found out their business proposal had been rejected and since the time had passed at least a half dozen other companies had a chance to pitch their proposals.Just before giving up Mike had an idea to contact a Samoan government owned technology company that was given the contract and placed a call to the General Manager. He knew that their ability to properly market the domain on a global scale would be very limited and he pitched to him the idea of starting a partnership. The company accepted the deal.Moving forward to November of 2000, Global Domains International had sold over 100,000 .ws domains to the customers in over 180 countries. Big names like Yahoo!, Cisco, Dell Computers and Intel are customers as well as many top fortune 500 companies that are buying up the .ws extension dailyThe Samoan company wanted to test them and see if they could produce 15,000 .ws registrations in three years and GDI was able to do it in the first month of business. Now they enjoy a percentage of all sales produced by Global Domains International and GDI now has an exclusive 12 year contract to distribute the .ws name worldwide.