The Nigerian Internet Registration Association (NIRA) yesterday bemoaned the billions of Naira lost to the country because majority of the ‘dotng’ (.ng) domain names are currently hosted abroad.
Mr Sunday Folayan, President of NIRA while speaking about the issue said “Nigeria is losing not less than N10billion yearly through hosting its country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), dotng (.ng) outside the country. He also added that only about 1 percent of the .ng domains registered by NIRA registrars are currently hosted in Nigeria.
But N10billion isn’t even the entire estimated amount. When .com domains registered with NIRA but are equally also hosted abroad are taken into account, the total amount lost to capital flight as a result of this is about N60 million, Folayan said.
Why is NIRA’s complaint important?
In order to own a website, there are three important things you need to do;
- Register a website address (otherwise known as acquiring a domain name)
- Create the website
- Rent storage space on a web hosting company’s server to hold all of your website’s content.
What NIRA is complaining about is that 99 percent of those who have registered their websites in Nigeria have chosen to rent server spaces (for their website content) from foreign companies. So that instead of paying local companies and keeping the money within our economy, far too many people who either operate their websites from Nigeria or at least use our ccTLD, pay rent to company’s abroad thereby leading to capital flight.
If NIRA could somehow win over the trusts of all these people so that they pay Nigerian web hosting companies the internet server ‘rent’ they now pay to companies abroad, we’ll be keeping a lot of money within our economy. And that’s all NIRA is trying to make you see
However, until NIRA finds a way to do the above, I don’t see the numbers changing very soon. One website developer told me he’d rather pay a foreign company to host his sites because he wouldn’t have to bother about their server being down due to electricity outages (or ‘No NEPA’). And should in case, a server problem crops up, he had more faith that the foreign companies will respond quicker to his complaints than a Nigerian company would.