.ws is the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

country code Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes (geocodes) developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this. The term ' ...

ccTLD A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all tw ...

) for

Samoa Samoa, officially the Independent State of Samoa; sm, Sāmoa, and until 1997 known as Western Samoa, is a Polynesian island country consisting of two main islands ( Savai'i and Upolu); two smaller, inhabited islands ( Manono and Apolima); a ...

. It is administered by SamoaNIC, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Samoa. The .ws domain is an abbreviation for "Western Samoa", which was the nation's official name in the 1970s when two-letter country codes were standardized. Although there are no geographic restrictions on registration of most second-level .ws domains, .org.ws, .gov.ws, and .edu.ws registration is restricted. Prior to March 14, 2008, .ws domains were not allowed to be transferred from one domain registrar to another. The .ws country code has been marketed as a

domain hack A domain hack is a domain name that suggests a word, phrase, or name when concatenating two or more adjacent levels of that domain. For example, and , using the fictitious country-code domains ''.ds'' and ''.le'', suggest the words ''birds'' a ...

, with the ws purportedly standing for "world site", website or web service, providing a "global" Internet presence to registrants, as it supports all internationalized domain names. A popular use for the domain is for news organizations for

URL shortening URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect which links to the web page that has ...

purposes, mainly suffixed as "(organization name)ne.ws". Due to its potential popularity, a sliding scale of prices is operated by the registrar, depending on the brevity of the desired domain. Domains with four characters or more are competitively priced while three-, two-, and single-character domains have their own pricing tiers, quickly scaling into thousands of United States dollars. A company named "Global Domains International" operates a multi-level marketing scheme for .ws domain reselling. In 2016, .ws gained popularity as one of the first

domain name registries Domain may refer to: Mathematics *Domain of a function, the set of input values for which the (total) function is defined ** Domain of definition of a partial function ** Natural domain of a partial function ** Domain of holomorphy of a function * ...

to offer

emoji domain An emoji domain is a domain name with one or more emoji in it, for example 😉.. Function With the exception of the information emoji (), the trademark emoji () and the "m" emoji (), for an emoji to work as a domain name, it must be convert ...

s. , there are approximately 25,000 emoji domains registered on .ws. Google treats the .ws

as a generic top level domain

gTLD Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. A top-level domain is the last level of eve ...

References

External links

IANA .ws whois information

SamoaNIC.ws
(for registrants in Samoa and some nearby countries) Country code top-level domains Communications in Samoa {{compu-domain-stub

See also

References

External links