The rate at which Nigerian developers host web projects with foreign hosting companies is becoming alarming. This is not because Nigerians do not have their web hosting service providers. We have them, some of them are “who go, host,” “smart web” etc.
Regardless of promising benefits that come with hosting with Nigerian companies, such as the ability to pay in Naira via bank deposit or with a debit or ATM transfer.
Only a few numbers of people will prefer Nigeria hosting to remote hosting. The one that gets anybody astonished is when the exchange rate became so high. Some developers were so concerned and took it up to Facebook to complain about how the exchange rate was affecting them, and behold paying for hosting subscription was their priority.
Pitifully, I see people talking offenses about anything that comes from Nigeria, until when I had my realistic experience, early last year. After developing my first website, I was so quick to host it, and hosting with Nigerian company was my wish. Since I have always wanted to disprove those who claim Nigerian hosting company is a joke.
But how was my experience hosting in Nigeria, was it a positive one, the answer is no? I’d choose not to disclose the name of the hosting company but would rather share part of my experience that makes most developers conclude not to host with indigenous companies.
1. Poor customer service: The online customer care support I received when I was finding it difficult to upload my site was abysmal. The first complaint ticket I submit was not attended to; it takes over one week with more than five tickets before I could get a response. This is a critical case, which Nigeria web hosting should improve upon.
2. Slow website loading speed: I also noticed that the hosted site takes the time to come up. In fact, those extra seconds delay before the site could load in the browser is most annoying. The effect on search engine ranking is huge, and this just means search engine will find it difficult to crawl and index a slow website. This is a big thing for developers.
3. Frequent downtime: At times I would try accessing my website, and it will not load. This can be attributed to unstable resources that can keep the storage house running uninterruptedly, and this is one thing that website users don’t like, trying to access a site, and it’s not coming up.
It usually belittles developers and makes them foolish before their client, especially if the customer’s access the website and is not reachable, that moment is usually difficult to explain to no-tech person.
While I tried to explain based on my personal experience, some other possible reasons as gathered from information hood are limited Resources and not being serious with business.
Conclusion
The above fact does not mean all Nigeria web hosting company are the same, and have similar weaknesses.
It always advisable to do a research to decide whether hosting with Nigeria is okay, as hosting with Nigerian companies to have a lot of advantages as well.
