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- 15 per cent of registered domains are with errors.
- .com.ng domain amounts to 70 per cent of all national domains registered.
By Oluwatobi Opusunju
With majority of .ng and .com.ng websites in Nigeria being hosted in the United States of America (USA), Africa’s largest economy is losing about 72% of the revenue she ought to be generating through the local hosting of such websites to the USA even as registered .ng domains hit 100,973.
This was made known through a recent report on the use of domain names in the national domain of Nigeria, named .ng which was conducted by a web-hosting company, HUB8.
The .ng is Nigeria’s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), which is the country’s digital imprint on the World Wide Web (WWW).
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 making accruable revenue from domain name hosting extremely negligible in Nigeria
“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 United States (72 per cent),” translating into loss of 72 per cent hosting revenue for Nigeria,” the report stated.
Often, stakeholders have increasingly clamored that hosting domain names locally will help curb the increasing rate of capital flight and in turn bring greater economic value to the country even as the country is still trying to recuperate from the grip of economic recession. But negative business confidence, poor state of infrastructure and low perception of the local domain hosting companies have connived to scare clients from the local market.
The report reflects an earlier statistical report by the Nigeria Internet Registration Association’s (NiRA) putting registered domains in .ng domain zone as at November, 2017 at 100,973.
However, the HUB8 report stated that the research 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 and it 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 reveals that the most popular domain zone is .com.ng, having almost 70 per cent of all national domains registered.
The .ng domain zone, the report says, comes next although within the zone the domain name is shorter but the particular domain registration costs more than .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 stated. Others 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, according to the HUB8 repor, 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 says.
According to the report,operating sites are reported on 45 per cent of .com.ng and .ng domains.
Also, 15 per cent of registered domains are said to be with errors indicating “connection time-out” presumably for some temporary problems regarding hosting or channels.
Additionally, about 3 per cent of domains are redirected to other sites and the same number displaying error pages such as “404 Page Not Found” or “500 Server Error.”
Commenting further on the findings of the report, Director for Emerging Markets at HUB8, Mr. Dmitry Deniskin, said used content management systems (CMS) of the .com.ng and .ng domains were 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 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,” he said.
Deniskin also explained that what HUB8 intends to do is 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.
He said: “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 small enterprises in emerging markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
