According to a Market Research Future Report, the global web hosting services industry is expected to rise to approximately $154bn in 2022.
This is indeed a good development. My only worry is that indigenous web hosting companies are still grappling with survival yet alone compete globally.
The fact that only a handful of players dominate the industry globally means there is a lot of room for regional players to serve their local markets.
Considering the Nigerian situation, one wonders the economic impact indigenous web hosting services would have had if everyone hosting websites and applications abroad did so with or through them.
Before I proceed, let me commend the efforts of various players who have done their best to continue to serve the local hosting market despite the obvious challenges.
Yes, many of them are faced with issues of inadequate manpower, low patronage, poor infrastructure and huge overheads. In fact, the number of individuals and businesses that host their websites in Nigeria is far cry to those that host with foreign web hosting companies. The gap is just huge and something drastic has to be done as soon as possible to bridge the gap.
One of the astonishing aspects of this narrative is that Nigerians do not even mind the high exchange rate of naira to the dollar. They are very much comfortable paying to these foreign hosting companies.
The implication of this is that the country is losing foreign exchange. The capital flight was estimated to be $59.8m (about N21.8bn) in 2017 alone.
The balancing question would be this; how many of the hosting companies are currently situated in any of the world-class data centres located in the country? I ask because I am aware many of them patronise foreign data centres or much bigger web hosting companies. Isn’t this an irony?
Out of thousands of .ng websites, the Nigerian Internet Registration Association reported that only 1.3 per cent was domiciled in the country.
To put this in perspective, NiRA recorded 100,973 .ng domain sites in November 2017, and 99,469 of these sites were being hosted outside the country.
These figures, which are clearly unfavourable to Nigeria, do not show any sign of abating as they continue to grow. The reasons for this are not farfetched.
From what we have seen over the years, it seems that Nigeria is not ready to fix pressing issues such as power and other infrastructural problems that seriously affect the cost structure that goes with hosting, hence, militating against local hosting companies performing with dexterity, compared to their foreign counterparts.
Indigenous web hosting companies too need to scale up their games. They should be at par with global competition, but this is largely dependent on how — Finish Reading on the Punch
