By Emma Okonji
A research report conducted on the registration and use of the .ng domain name this December by a web-hosting company, HUB8, shows huge loss of revenue stream from Nigeria to the United States, as a result of the number of business operating websites in Nigeria that are being hosted and managed in the United States(US).
According to the report, Nigeria is losing up to 72 per cent of the revenue it should be generating from the hosting of such local websites that are currently being hosted in the US.
The .ng domain name is Nigeria’s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), which is the country’s identity in the cyberspace, but most businesses still prefer to register their companies with foreign domain names, while those who decided to register with the local .ng domain name, chose to host the website abroad, for security reasons which bothers on fear of losing their data to hackers.
According to the report, out of the 34,000 sites, less than 1,000 are located in Nigeria, which is only 2.3 per cent of the total.
“The dominant countries where site hosting often occurs were determined for the .ng and .com.ng domains. The overwhelming number of sites are located in the US (72 per cent),†translating into loss of 72 per cent hosting revenue for Nigeria, according to the report.
This 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.
Meanwhile, HUB8 report was based on 89,165 domain names in the .ng domain zone with particular focus on the details of the usage of .ng domains as it relates to website hosting.
The report, 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.
On the distribution of the domain zones, the report revealed that most popular domain zone is .com.ng, having almost 70 per cent of all national domains registered.
The .ng domain zone, according to the report, 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 by the study 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,†the report said.
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.
In terms of active websites, the HUB8 report noted that there are currently 38,864 websites in the .ng domain, not including the sites that fail to open to the connection timeout, redirects and the ones throwing an error (page is not found). “The existing sites are hosted only in half of the .com.ng and one-third of the .ng domains,†the report said.
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, stating that 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 utilised 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,†Deniskin said.
To reverse the trend, Deniskin said HUB8, which is a global web hosting company, would help brands and individuals to easily set-up a website and host same in Nigeria.
“Our ultimate goal is to become a growth partner for individuals and small enterprises in emerging markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America,” he said.
