.ws

.ws is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Samoa. It is administered by SamoaNIC, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Samoa. Global Domains International (GDI) markets .ws registrations worldwide.

It has been marketed — and achieved a degree of popularity — as an alternative to the more "crowded" generic top-level domains, where the selection of unregistered domain names is much more limited. In this context, .ws is suggested to stand for "web site", "world site" or "web service"; the original intent was to abbreviate "Western Samoa", the nation's official name when two-letter country codes were standardized in the 1970s. There are no geographic restrictions on registration of .ws domains.

2nd level domains: 3 TLDs for domain registration to the general public: .WS, .COM.WS and .NET.WS. WS also offers 3 restricted TLDs: .ORG.WS, .GOV.WS and .EDU.WS.

One limitation of .ws is that existing domains registered in this TLD are *not portable; they cannot be moved from one registrar to another. The use of wildcard DNS records to serve advertising on all unregistered and newly-registered .ws domains is also an issue.

* As of January 2008 GDI is working on plans to change this and say transfers will be possible soon.