The country have 100,000 registered domain names but barely any of the domain names are registered in Nigeria. A report released in December 2017 by a web-hosting company has shown that a large majority of .ng and com.ng websites in Nigeria are hosted in the United States which is responsible for the nation losing about 72% of the revenue local web hosting would have generated.The report was carried out by HUB8 which is a web-hosting company and revealed that only 2.3% of the total of 34000 hosted sites, which is less than 1,000, is actually located in Nigeria.The overwhelming numbers of sites are located in the United States which translates into a loss of 72% in 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).The report is based on 89165 domain names in the .ng domain zone, with a particular focus on the details of the usage of .ng as it relates to website hosting. It, however, does not include data on premium domains which is about 2000 and other special domains that are registered but not used by end users. It further states that the .ng domain name is a shorter domain registration but costs much more than com.ng. While .org.ng, which is usually used by non-profit organizations, ranks third in order of registration cost. Read Also: A Nigerian developer has produced Africa’s first Bible-based gameBut it isn’t all bad news for Nigerian domain namesIn November the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) released data that showed that the number of .ng domain names increased by about 12,248 new domain registrations which were recorded in the three months under review, with 6,420 renewals and 198 transfers to other registrars.This led to the crossing of the 100,000th mark for the .ng domain name registrations as a result of growing at a rate of about 75% year on year. Now the NIRA hope to cross the 1,000,000th mark.The most popular domain zone as .com.ng with almost 70% of all national domains registered followed by .ng which is mainly because it costs several times more than .com.ng while .org.ng which ranks third is usually used by non-profit organizations.
