.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.
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" or "world site"; 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.
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