Latest report released by an indigenous web-hosting company, HUB8, has revealed that the economy is on a losing stretch as far as the digital economy is concerned as well over 72 per cent of websites operated in Nigeria are hosted abroad and United States in particular.
The report averred that most of .ng and .com.ng websites in Nigeria which are hosted in the United States and Israel rake in money that ordinarily would have paid to local hosting companies.
However, several analysts had tied hosting of webs abroad to high level safety and data security as intermittent power situation in Nigeria is capable of crashing or creating hiccups and unprecedented downtimes which several businesses may not effectively tolerate after all.
Even several Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) had come under the attack of Nigeria Information technology Development Agency (NITDA) for refusing to host their data in Nigeria.
Business Hilights recalls that it was on the same power crisis and lack of manpower that Microsoft moved away its well publicized $30bn double data centre investment from Nigeria to South Africa earlier in the year.
Besides, the HUB 8 report said 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 country of origin for the remaining 3 per cent of sites could not be identified so Nigeria’s share is slightly larger, though still not comparable with the amount of hosting abroad.
The report noted that “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 .ng is Nigeria’s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), which is the country’s digital imprint on the World Wide Web (WWW).
