IDEALLY, hosting domain names locally will curb capital flight and bring greater economic value. Sadly, as it stands, majority of .ng and .com.ng websites in Nigeria are hosted in the United States, making Nigeria lose about 72 percent of the revenue local web hosting would have generated, a new report has shown.
The research which was carried out in December by a web-hosting company, HUB8, that revealed that out of the 34,000 sites, less than 1,000 are located in Nigeria, which is only 2.3 per cent of the total.
It reads; “The dominant countries where site hosting often occurs were determined for the .ng and .com.ng domains. The overwhelming numbers of sites are located in the United States (72 per cent); translating into loss of 72 per cent hosting revenue for Nigeria. The .ng is Nigeria’s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), which is the country’s digital imprint on the World Wide Web (WWW).”
The HUB8 report is based on 89,165 domain names in the .ng domain zone, with particular focus on the details of the usage of .ng as it relates to website hosting. It, however, does not include data on premium domains, about 2,000 and some special domains that are technically registered though not used by end users.
The report further states, “The .ng domain zone comes next although within the zone a domain name is shorter but domain registration here costs several times more than in .com.ng while .org.ng, which is usually used by non-profit organisations, ranks third with an age backlog.
“The number of zones identified include .com.ng; .ng; .org.ng; .gov.ng and .edu.ng with number of domains being 61,609 (69.1 per cent); 15,353 (17.2 per cent); 6,077 (6.8 per cent); 1,738 (1.9 per cent and 996 (1.1 per cent) respectively. Others such domain zones include .net.ng; .name.ng; .sch.ng; .i.ng; .mobi.ng and .mil.ng, all which have less than one per cent market share.”
Commenting further on the findings of the report, Director for Emerging Markets at HUB8, Mr. Dmitry Deniskin, said; “Often used Content Management System, CMS, was detected in the existing websites, and the most popular CMS is expected to be WordPress, being installed on every one in three sites in the .ng and .com.ng domains. WordPress has a 78 per cent share of all used CMS.
Blogging is currently very popular in Nigeria; almost 1,500 domains are affiliated with Blogger.com. Specialised CMS utilized for e-commerce, such as Magento, Prestashop, Shopify, WooCommerce, nopCommerce, oSCommerce and X-Cart use about 500 sites in the .com.ng and .ng zones.
“In this light, HUB8 intends to help Nigeria reverse the current situation in which 72 per cent of .com.ng and .ng domain names hosting is lost to the US. HUB8 is a global web hosting company helping brands and individuals to easily set-up a website. Our ultimate goal is to become a growth partner for individuals and SMEs in emerging markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
We are providing free web hosting in Nigeria because we are aware that people postpone launching a website due to the investments involved. We want to make it possible for all to have a personal or business website without worrying about the costs,” Deniskin declared.
This report is coming just as the Nigeria Internet Registration Association, NIRA, managers of the country’s domain names system (DNS) ecosystem, declared it has, so far, registered 100,973 domains in .ng domain zone as at November 30, 2017.
President of NIRA, Mr. Sunday Folayan, who has continuously rued the poor local content in the county’s DNS ecosystem, disclosed that; “The association would support any initiative and policy aimed at deepening local hosting of .ng domain names. Over the years, NIRA has made conscious efforts to populate and to continue to populate the country’s DNS system. It is our belief that increased adoption of .ng domain names by individuals, businesses and government agencies would help the country reduce capital flight being recorded with the preponderant use of foreign domain names such as .com, .net, .za, .ua, among others.
“We also need to encourage local hosting with the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) and similar organizations. With this we reduce cost of accessing the internet and curb revenue flight to foreign lands,” he added.
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