Name: Global Domains International(GDI)
Website URL: http://website.ws
Product Owner: Michael Starr and Alan Ezeir
Type Of Business: MLM
Advertised Price: 7 Day Free Trial Then $10 Per Month + Many Other Fees
Overall Rating: Stars Out Of A 5 Star Rating
A Brief Overview Of GDI And What To Expect Before You Join
There are actually 2 sides to this business and in this review, I will cover both of them in detail and show you exactly what you will get before you spend your hard earned money on GDI with hopes on making lots of money with this program.
Internet Address For Life- This is the domain registrar side of the business. You can register a.WS domain name here, as well as purchase a hosting plan, and a site builder to build a website on your newly purchased domain.
You will end up paying 3 or 4 times more for these domains than you would at Godaddy or NameCheap and their hosting prices are also downright ridiculous.
These domains are also geo-targeted toward the country Western Somalia hence the.WS extension. This is a country which has a population of under 200,000 people. If you are looking to gain worldwide exposure to your website, it’s not going to happen with a.WS domain.
Income For Life- This is the MLM side of the business and how you can earn revenue by recruiting other people and building your downline. They have 2 packages in which you can earn commissions from by referring other people into the program. I will cover both of these packages below and show you the earning potential with each one.
How GDI Works And How Do You Make Money With Them?
I like to refer to this company as a domain registrar with a twist. Their affiliate program is setup in an MLM fashion and looks like a pyramid scheme. The way this program works is you purchase domain name packages and get people to join through your link. You will get paid on the sales you make, as well as the sales that your referrals make up to 5 levels deep.
There are 2 plans that you can make money from with the Income for life program
Depending on which package you choose, this will determine how much money you can potentially make using this system.
Basic Plan
- $1 commission for every affiliate you sign up for on the basic $10 per month plan
- Earn $1 commission when your referrals sign other people up for the $10 plan up to 5 levels deep
- You also get paid a 10% commission whenever your referrals purchase any premium service(Hosting, site builder, domain forwarding)
Premium Plan
- Earn $15 per sign up on any premium affiliate on level 1
- Earn $5 per sign up for any premium affiliates on levels 2-5
- $100 bonus for every 5 premium affiliates who sign up under you
- Get entered into GDI’s daily drawing to get free leads every day
Here’s A Little Insight Into The WS Domain Extension And What They Mean
I have been building websites for close to 3 years now and I personally wouldn’t touch a WS extension with a 10-foot pole. A real webmaster who knows what he’s doing wouldn’t either and there’s a good reason for this.
Technically WS stands for the country Western Samoa and, therefore, any domain names that you register with this extension will be targeted to only this country. Now if you are setting up a campaign and you wanted to specifically target this 1 country then this would be perfect for that.
Why anyone would want to narrow their reach to this one small country is beyond me. If you are serious about building a website that will get ranked in Google and get worldwide exposure, I would recommend a .com over a.WS any day.
While they do claim that these domains can be reached worldwide, this isn’t 100% certain. If I was going to rate domain extensions in order of importance, this would be .com first, .org as my second choice, and a .net would be my last resort.
Let me ask you a question. When searching the web have you ever come across a.WS domain name that was ranked on the first page of Google? I don’t know about you, but I have NEVER seen one ranked anywhere close to the first page.
Here’s What I Liked
- Offers A 7 Day Free Trial
Here’s What I Didn’t Like
- Setup Like A Pyramid Scheme
- WS extensions carry little to NO weight when it comes to SEO and getting good rankings in Google
- You’ll end up paying 3 or 4 times more what you would with a regular domain registrar like Go Daddy
- Requires that you pay for services that are free with normal domain registrars
- Charges a fee to join their affiliate program(A huge red flag)
How Much Will This End Up Costing You If You Want To Make Some Decent Money?
Depending on whether you join “Internet Address For Life” or “Income For Life” will determine how much you’ll end up paying. If you are more interested in the domain registrar side then you’ll likely end up forking over more cash than if you were just an affiliate for them.
Internet Address For Life- If you are looking to score a.WS domain name be ready to pay out the ass for it. In the 3 years that I have been an online marketer, I have never seen a company charge so much for a domain name. Especially for one that’s pretty much useless to begin with as far as ranking them in the search engines.
Take A Look At How Much You’ll End Up Paying Just To Secure A Domain With The Extension Of .WS
I like it how they have circled the 10-year option as being your best option. In the 3 years I have been building websites, I have never renewed a domain for 10 years. I especially wouldn’t register a.WS domain for that long because they don’t rank that well in Google and you aren’t sure if the domain will be profitable or not.
Let’s not forget about hosting which you will need before your website goes live on the web. Their hosting prices are downright insane and I don’t know how they can get by with charging this much. Take a look at a few other services that are required before your site goes live on the web.
Most of the services listed above could be found elsewhere for about 80% cheaper than the price you’ll end up paying for them here. As a matter of fact, I just bought a .com domain name the other day from GoDaddy for only $1.17 after the ICANN fee. It makes absolutely NO sense why anyone would charge this much for a domain name.
Income For Life- Like I mentioned earlier, there are 2 packages for you to choose from as an affiliate. Their basic plan, which is their most popular one will end up costing you $10 a month. Now if this plan paid a little better it MIGHT be worth $10 a month.
Due to their super low commission of only $1 per customer a month you will be lucky to make your $10 back, let alone actually be able to profit from this.
They do offer a premium plan that pays a little bit better but be prepared to dish out an extra $40 a month. You would think after dishing out all this money for a domain name, hosting, and a site builder, on top of enrolling into their affiliate program it would be time to make some money wouldn’t you?
Before you can advertise these domain names and make money, you’ll need to get some targeted traffic to your site. You are going to need some leads(Potential interested clients). This is yet, another expense you’ll encounter along the way which will set you back $3 per lead. This can get pretty expensive when first starting out and new to how everything works.
You also won’t see this mentioned anywhere on their website until you have already invested a good amount of money into their program.
Let’s Compare These Services To What You Would Normally Pay
1. Domain Email Forwarding- When you purchase a domain anywhere else you naturally get your own email address associated with it. This is offered at no extra charge and is included with your domain purchase. Also, the ability to forward your domain email to another email is a free service that’s offered everywhere. Charging for this service is just wrong when it’s should be included with your purchase.
2. Sitebuilder- There are a plethora of site builders out there. Some of them are actually free and others are paid. Even the pro plans of well known builders are way cheaper than what you’ll end up paying with GDI. As a matter of fact, the website you are on right now was built using the SiteRubix Website Builder which was Free, with the option to upgrade. Charging an upfront yearly fee just to build a website is crazy, but as you can see GDI is doing just that.
3. Standard hosting/ Deluxe Hosting- There are many hosting companies out there that will host your site for as little as $6-$10 a month depending on what your hosting needs are. As I was doing my research on this program, and I saw how much they were selling their hosting packages for I had to look twice to make sure my eyes wasn’t playing a trick on me lol.
For the price you’ll pay for a year of deluxe hosting at GDI, you could get an entire year of state of the art secure and high-speed hosting. Along with a community of experts to answer your questions within minutes of asking them. Not to mention, one of the best training platforms that you’ll find anywhere online.
Instead of paying $359/yearly for some low quality hosting you could get a first class education in Internet marketing including a site builder and host all included at Wealthy Affiliate.
My Closing Thoughts And Conclusion
Let’s face it, just the thought of selling domain names sounds really boring to me anyways. What about you guys? Could you see yourself trying to convince your friends and family to purchase a .WS domain? If your friends or family is anything like mine are, they will likely look at you like you have a couple screws loose and ask you what the heck a .WS is.
If you are just starting out in the online world and looking to build an online business while keeping your costs to a minimum, I’m afraid GDI just won’t cut it for you. As you can see, this program can get really expensive fast. Just the fact that they are charging for services that are naturally included with your domain purchase is enough to turn me off from this program.
You will also be getting yourself wrapped up in another pyramid scheme due to the fact that their entire business model is MLM. Every MLM company out there needs a product in order for it to be legal and GDI’s product is selling.WS domain names.
There are much more affordable options available to you to get a domain name, a website builder, and hosting all in one place for a fraction of what you’ll end up paying with this company. I really hope this review has given you an inside look at GDI and that you were able to make a sound decision as to whether this program would be a good fit for you or not.
Do you have any stories that you would like to share with everyone today about this company? Are you a previous member or maybe you were thinking of joining but still not sure? I would love to hear about your experience as well as answer any further questions you may have about this in the comments below.
Your Friend, Scott
Vincent R. Parker
Hi Scott,
The blog looks great and is nicely set up. I would like to point out some misinformation in your post and clarify a few things.
I’ve been a customer and affiliate of GDI since 2006 and some of the information in this review is incorrect. For instance, you keep saying that you have to pay additional for anything other than the domain name itself. This is not true.
Every domain comes with, at no additional charge, hosting (that includes their sitebuilder if you want to use it, self hosting, ftp, domain forwarding, WordPress, Drupal, Coppermine, PhP forums, to name a few). It also includes 10 domain email addresses (yourname@yourdomain and such). There is more but, you get the point.
If you look at Google’s own articles domain extensions have so little weight, as one Google developer said, it’s almost non-existent. I run into .ws extensions at the top of Google for a number of searches. Even I had the top spot in many fairly competitive keywords when I was doing it exclusively. Life has since taken me elsewhere but, if you want to take a look at my paltry blog, I am stepping back in the game. Honestly, for something to fill some down time for myself.
I am a bit concerned about the use of the term pyramid scheme. You got it correct, as the FBI says, that a pyramid scheme has no product or service but… domain plus hosting plus emails plus their training videos (yes, on the members page you click training videos and there they are which are for marketing or creating websites and even SEO) and marketing materials and business opportunity. They have a product and service is my point.
Also, show me a business or organization or even religious church where there is not a boss on top and employees under. Even charity organizations have a pyramid structure. When people on the bottom can never make as much as people above them it’s a bit fishy (like most companies and corporations) but with GDI it only goes 5 levels deep. You can become a top earner no matter when you join.
I will agree the price is still a bit high. Their services do not include some nice things that BlueHost and GoDaddy and others have like C-Panel though they say they are working on releasing it. It would be so much nicer with C-Panel in my honest opinion.
Very few people have managed to reach your level of success in 10 months in any business that I have ever heard of. You are a diamond in the rough and know your stuff, that is without a doubt. I cannot claim to ever have reached that point in so short a time.
After 3 years of being inactive with GDI I’m now at a paltry $101 a month. Ouch! Though, I am working on changing that possibly. If I don’t get bored first. Haha. But, I don’t have to rely on it so, it’s not a big deal to me much anymore.
Anyway, congrats on your success and I bet you are amazing at helping your team members do the same. Just wanted to clarify some obvious errors in the post.
Also, unless you have money to burn, I really just don’t see the point in becoming premium with GDI. I used it for a few months before saying, I don’t need this! Oh, I’ve also NEVER bought leads from them or anyone. Why would you spend money on leads? Wow! Make your own! It is so possible. I’m not anywhere near smart and had my upline saying, how are you doing that? I, um, wrote stuff? Hehe.
Best of luck!
Vince
Scott Newkirk
Hi Vince,
Thank you so much for stopping by and clarifying a few things in this review. It’s always great to have an actual member stop by and share their experience with my readers here concerning GDI. After re-investigating this company again I stand corrected on a few things that you’ve said but most of what I said in my review above is correct. I will update this review to reflect those changes.
I’m actually in the process of trying to register a domain with them as I type out this reply and from what I can tell, you need to either provide them with your own nameservers or use their hosting service which you DO have to pay extra for. Check out my screenshot here to see what I’m talking about.
If I didn’t enter my own nameservers and I didn’t elect to use their paid hosting service then my domain would be parked there and would redirect to a under constuction page. Is there another hosting service that they offer that I’m not seeing here? In my experience with buying domains the hosting has NEVER been provided at no extra charge unless it was one of the features included in a premium package of some kind.
One of the only places that I’ve found that does include hosting in their premium membership is Wealthy Affiliate. I would love to know how you managed to get hosting provided with your domain name at no extra charge.
Everyone knows that a .com is the way to ultimitely go and Google favors this over any other TLD extension. From there they go down to .org and .net. In my opinion, and due to my own personal experience I would never go for any other domain extensions and I definitely would never go for a .WS. I have had a look at your .WS domain and it looks like you have some pretty solid information on there but what keywords are you ranking for?
I have never seen a .WS domain on the first page of Google before and I have been in the game since late 2012- early 2013. I’m not saying this isn’t possible because Google is constantly changes their rules and doing algo updates. I would love for you to prove me wrong and show me a .WS that is on the first page of Google.
I guess you could call their hosting package and their training videos a service if you wanted to, but to be honest with you Vince, this just sounds like they are using this (So called product or service) to hide their pyramid scheme structure.
Besides hosting, these other services are inferior and usually come standard with any other domain registrar. It don’t sound like much of a product or service to me but to each it’s own I guess.
I do agree with you that almost any company you join there is going to be a boss at the top and employees under you but, they aren’t all setup in a pyramid style. The main thing that determines whether a company is a pyramid scheme is if they offer commission on more than 1 level (GDI offers this 5 levels deep). Some people are cool with pyramid schemes and that’s fine but I feel that this isn’t a reliable and sturdy business model due to me getting burned several times in the past from programs set up in this structure.
I’m glad to hear that you have been with them since 2006 and that you have been pretty successful with them. Congratulations!! I agree that most people don’t achieve the amount of success that I’ve had when first starting out in the online business world. I guess this just goes to prove that you really can acheive anything that you set your mind too.
It took me close to 12-16 hours a day for the first 3 or 4 months before I started to see any kind of results and most people either aren’t willing to spend that much time, or they simply don’t have the time. Thank you so much for the kind words Vince and yes my team tells me all the time what a good leader I am.
I do want to thank you so much for dropping by though and clarifying a few errors in this review and I will make the necessary changes A.S.A.P! I agree with you that their premium package isn’t worth the money and I would also NEVER waste money buying leads. 99% of these leads are recycled and are not going to be targeted towards your niche.
Cheers
~Scott~