Vavatau Technology

Global Domain International

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Global Domain International is a worldwide Domain and Website Registration and Hosting Company.

Before you can start up a business - any business - customers need to be able to find you. On the Internet, your address is your domain name; the part of an Internet address that comes after the www. With the unparalleled growth of the Internet, dot com domain names continue to sell like hotcakes. Currently, there are more than 20 million dot com domains, and over 34 million total domains registered worldwide. Industry experts forecast that more than 500 million domains will be registered in the next ten years. In fact, reliable sources from companies like Intel are predicting that every personal computer in the future will have its own domain name.

In 1998, the dot com craze was beginning to ramp up to unbelievable proportions. So many Internet companies sprouted up in Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, that companies not swept up in the hysteria were thought to be missing out. But, while most people were focused on things like Content, Banner Ads and Bandwidth, Michael Reed and Alan Ezeir, the CEO and President respectively of Global Domains International, Inc. (GDI), recognized another opportunity that was largely ignored; they wondered, "Besides dot com, are there other extensions that businesses could use as a domain name?"

Mike and Alan 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!" 

In November 2000, less than nine months after launching .WS to the global Internet community, GDI announced it had sold over 100,000 .WS registrations to customers such as Yahoo!, Intel, Cisco, Dell Computers, and other companies and individuals in more than 180 countries.

And the Samoans?

"They originally wanted to wait to see just how well we performed," Mike said. "They proposed that, as a test, our Company had to produce 15,000 registrations in just three years. We did that in the first month," Alan proudly stated. "The Nation of Samoa now receives a percentage of all .WS domain sales that GDI generates, and is delighted with our success. Our company is proud of our exclusive agreement to distribute .WS worldwide."

As proud and exciting as the beginning of .WS was for Mike and Alan, the future is what excites them most. Just before .WS recorded its first registration, Mike and Alan knew the time had arrived to begin building their business to reflect its quickly changing personality -- from a forty-person shop to that of a multi-national corporate conglomerate. To accomplish this, Mike and Alan focused on surrounding themselves with intelligent people who were filled with enthusiasm, and had the capacity to help launch their business on an international scale. In addition, the .WS founders beefed up their marketing outreach with ad placements in Fortune Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Additional ads appeared in Major League Baseball's 2000 World Series program, and thousands of radio spots aired in large urban markets. Mike and Alan also invested heavily in the company's infrastructure, ensuring that the anticipated volume of registrations would be handled with relative ease and no downtime.

And now, what do Mike and Alan have to say about their "idea," a little more than a year after their harried plane-trip across the Pacific? Mike said, "It's all about taking a risk and believing in a concept enough to drop everything and make it a reality." Alan concurs. "We are extremely excited about what the next few years have in store for everyone who joins us as we make .WS the global standard for Internet addresses."

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."