.ws is the

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

country code A country code is a short alphanumeric identification code for countries and dependent areas. Its primary use is in data processing and communications. Several identification systems have been developed. The term ''country code'' frequently re ...

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domain name, domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the DNS root zone, root zone of the nam ...

(

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 and known until 1997 as Western Samoa, is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania, in the South Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main islands (Savai'i and Upolu), two smaller, inhabited ...

. It is administered by SamoaNIC, for the

Ministry of Foreign Affairs In many countries, the ministry of foreign affairs (abbreviated as MFA or MOFA) is the highest government department exclusively or primarily responsible for the state's foreign policy and relations, diplomacy, bilateral, and multilateral r ...

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 domains ''.bot'' and ''.le'', suggest the words ''robot'' and ''example'' respective ...

, with the ws purportedly standing for "world site",

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

web service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

, providing a "global" Internet presence to registrants, as it supports all

internationalized domain name An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-Latin script or alphabet or in the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacrit ...

s. A popular use for the domain is for

news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the te ...

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 a ...

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 Multi-level marketing (MLM), also called network marketing or pyramid selling, is a controversial and sometimes illegal marketing strategy for the sale of products or services in which the revenue of the MLM company is derived from a non-salarie ...

scheme for .ws domain reselling. In 2016, .ws gained popularity as one of the first domain name registries 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 ev ...

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