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• The .WS Story

GDI was founded by Maichael Reed and Alan Ezeir. They were aware that in the mid 1990's, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned each nation a country code. These codes were designed to give each country an address to use for their own Internet needs. For instance, the United States was assigned .us, Australia .au, Ireland .ie. "We knew that a good, easy-to-remember country code could be marketable globally as a viable alternative to .com," said Alan. "And so," Mike added, "we ordered some pizza, locked ourselves in a room, and went through the entire list of countries to pinpoint the best possible code."

GDI was founded by Maichael Reed and Alan Ezeir. They were aware that in the mid 1990's, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned each nation a country code. These codes were designed to give each country an address to use for their own Internet needs. For instance, the United States was assigned .us, Australia .au, Ireland .ie. "We knew that a good, easy-to-remember country code could be marketable globally as a viable alternative to .com," said Alan. "And so," Mike added, "we ordered some pizza, locked ourselves in a room, and went through the entire list of countries to pinpoint the best possible code."

They ultimately focused on the domain extension .WS -- which belongs to the tiny island nation of Samoa, deep in the South Pacific. "We thought that the abbreviation .WS could be successfully marketed worldwide as the 'WebSite' top-level domain," said Mike. "There were a small handful of other viable options, but through resolve and perseverance, we found that some countries were already using their domain locally, and not interested in becoming an 'open' or 'global' registry. With a population of less than 200,000 people, Samoa had yet to utilize their domain on a massive scale. And, none of the other countries' domains compared to the potential branding power of .WS to signify 'WebSite'. After all," Mike happily exclaimed, "everyone in the free world knows what a web site is!"

• A Company of Excellence

In the 2002 Special issue of Inc. magazine, GDI placed #37 on the Inc. 500 "List" of the USA's 500 fastest growing private companies and #5 in the state of California.

"The truly exciting thing about GDI making the Inc. 500 List is the fact that we've barely even begun!" says Mike. "We've gotten to this level by serving only that tiny minority of Internet users who even know what a 'domain name' is and why they need one. We've actually begun to create a market by introducing .ws domains to the masses, with our turnkey, extremely affordable and easy to use packages of domain names, self-service instant websites, and personal email services. We're actually 'targeting' the other 99+% of the Internet community - families, single people, children, seniors, and small businesses - the vast majority of whom are new to domain names and just need something simple and affordable to get them excited. That is literally hundreds of millions of people globally who are prospects for our service."