Global Domains International Scam?

If you were to search on Google or another search engine for the term “Global Domains International scam”, you may find a bunch of websites that have an appearance of skepticism or objectivity, but then upon closer examination, they are actually thinly disguised affiliate websites designed to promote the Global Domains International business opportunity itself. This is one of the oldest tricks in internet marketing and affiliate marketing in general; build a website that appears to be an “unbiased review” of some type of business opportunity, all the while knowing that you’re secretly promoting that opportunity. Many websites even attempt to take a negative slant towards the opportunity to lure in the people who are more naturally skeptical, only to later promote the opportunity in a shameless sales pitch.  Well, this article is nothing like that. I don’t give a rat’s anus about joining Global Domains International, and I’m not going to hype up their opportunity for the sake of hopefully getting some kind of commission for doing so. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being an affiliate marketer, and there’s nothing wrong with affiliate marketing itself, but at the same time, I don’t believe in engaging in deceptive practices to get a sale. When I set out to write this article, I made sure to do some homework on Global Domains International, so that I wouldn’t be just blowing smoke, but actually having some grounds for saying what I’m going to say. First of all, GDI operates the website known as Website.ws, and from what I understand, they have full rights to the “dot ws” domain name extension. The extension actually originated as a country code, if you will, for the Western Samoan islands (each country has one), but the founders of GDI thought it would be a great branding tool to use the “.ws” extension to represent the word “website”. In other words, if you bought a domain name for yourself, and your name was Bob Jones, your domain name could be “bobjones.ws”, with the “ws” standing for “website” in most people’s minds. This is actually a pretty clever move by the founders of GDI, and from what I read on their company’s website, they partnered with the Western Samoan government to gain exclusive registration rights for that domain extension. The benefit that the Western Samoan government receives is actually a royalty, if you will, from every domain name registered through GDI.

Well, so far so good, right? I thought so as well, until I did some more homework and looked at their “Pricing” page. This is where I have to respectfully part ways with Global Domains International. The standard, per-year price (as of this writing) for one “dot ws” domain (with 4 or more characters) through GDI is $35, which in my humble opinion is a good price, if this was 1997. There’s no reason on God’s green earth for anyone to have to pay $35 a year for a domain in the 21^st Century. That’s just one man’s opinion; take it for what it’s worth. But to me, the truly extravagant pricing really happens with the different upsells and add-on services that GDI offers, such as domain/email forwarding, email addresses, and web hosting packages. This is where, in my mind, the price gouging really takes off. For example, a one-year (yes, just ONE YEAR) hosting package with a crappy 100MB of disk space and 10GB of bandwidth costs $239. Two-hundred and thirty-freakin’-nine dollars a year for sub-par hosting like that is absolutely nuts. There are tons of web hosting companies out there that offer way much more space and much more bandwidth, for FREE. As a matter of fact, it’s really lame if you are paying basically twenty bucks a month on any kind of hosting that’s not unlimited. In today’s web climate, these prices are not competitive at all, not even close. The only explanation I could possibly come up with for GDI offering hosting packages and domain fees so expensive is for the sake of the affiliates promoting these packages—there’s a bunch of “padding” built in there for profit. Again, don’t get me wrong—I believe in making a profit, but with competitively priced products, not products that have very obviously inflated prices. I haven’t taken a look at their compensation plan, but I do know that Global Domains International uses the dreaded network marketing concept to push their products, a concept which I know from personal experience is automatically a crappy deal. And just based on the kind of tactics I have observed from some of their affiliates (I found out about them from some dude sending me an email with his “dot ws” in the signature), it seems like the emphasis can lean towards recruiting people rather than pushing the products. The website that I visited had a really cool animated presentation about the opportunity, complete with the studly dude and hot chick driving the fast sports car, but again, it really seems like the emphasis was placed on how many people you can get signed up, versus actually joining the business on the merit of the products alone. I’m not blind to the fact that Global Domains International was named an Inc 500 company, and that’s no small thing, but what I hope doesn’t happen is what happened with Amway—a great company’s reputation gets trashed by the shady dealings of some (and possibly most) of its affiliates. So again, if I were to call Global Domains International a scam, that would probably not be accurate, but I will say that people will need to look out for shady dealings from some of their affiliates.