For many years now, the majority of Nigerians have given so much preference to patronizing foreign vendors. In terms of web hosting services; the difference between the number of websites hosted in Nigeria and abroad is colossal.
In spite of the high exchange rate of Naira to either Dollar of Euro, as the case may be. The penchant to having web hosting giants like GoDaddy, Bluehost etc never ceases. By implication, the country is loosing money to capital flight (money that goes out of the country) estimated to be $59.8m (N21.8bn).
Only 1.3 per cent of the total .ng servers are domiciled in the country, according to the Nigeria Internet Registration Association(NiRA). To put this in perspective. NiRA recorded 100,973 .ng domain sites in November 2017. And 99,469 of these sites are being hosted outside the country.
These figures which do not reflect anything good will continue to grow. This is simply due to the fact that Nigeria isn’t ready to fix a pressing issue such as power. Indigenous web hosting companies need to scale up thier games. And a part of this scale up is dependent on the provision of infrastructure like power.
Issues like customer service, frequent downtime, data loss, slow loading of sites etc. are mostly the factors that propel Nigerians to seek for the service of foreign web hosting firms. The service by these foreign firms may not be described as perfect. But miles away from what is obtainable in Nigeria
“Most of these sites are hosted outside Nigeria and there are many reasons for this,” Chief Executive Officer, Icecool Contracts Limited, Destiny Amana.
“The first reason is because there aren’t many web hosting companies that have the capacity to host locally in Nigeria, because of the high cost of bandwidth. Power issue is another thing if you need to run a server round the clock without any downtime.
“If you decide to host your servers in Nigeria by hook or by crook, there are companies that will look after your power and data issues in their data centres. But if I come to the data hosting company, they may pass on the cost of power, Internet bandwidth and manpower for monitoring the servers.
The cost incurred for that will be nothing less than N500,000 a month; and for one year, N6m ($19,672) will keep your server up.”
Changing the Narrative
With kind of ugly situation beaconing in the country. It is expedient to start changing the narrative and the perception. If not Nigeria stand the risk of loosing out to other countries for this service.
One time President of the Nigeria Internet Group, Bayo Banjo, believes that a tariff reduction would make a difference. This would make local traffic cheaper than traffic from other countries in order to encourage these firms to connect locally.
“The next step to encourage users is to apply a tariff difference. The issue is that this cost is based primarily on the cost of delivery of bandwidth.
Nigeria at the moment do not have laid down policies that encourage lowering tariff. And that remains a huge barrier for Nigeria to make progress.
Bayo said for it is to encourage users and people bringing their services in Nigeria. It will be an advantage to introduce a policy where each Internet provider will be able to separate the cost of their tariff.
So when you access a website abroad, you pay a higher rate, and when you access a local server, you pay a rate that is negligible.
“Nigerian organisations, knowing full well that for people to browse on their servers, it will cost next to nothing, they will bring it to Nigeria.
Servers are providing services that require you to stay on the web for a particular length of time; they will obviously bring their service here automatically and it will benefit the Nigerian people.”
