New Telegraph

Nigeria’s domain name registrations hit 167,798

Registration for Nigeria’s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), .ng, increased by 3, 256 in August. The new registrations brought the number of registered .ng to 167,798. With this, .ng has recorded additional 20,053 in the last eight months. According to data released by the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA), subscriptions for the domain name, which stood at 147,745 in December 2019, rose to 150,111 in January this year as 2,366 new registrations were recorded in the month.

In February, 2,800 new registrations were recorded, bringing the total to 152,911, while there were 754 registrations in March. In April, a record of 1,777 new registrations brought the country’s .ng database to 155,442, while the figure increased by 1,630 in May to 157,072. June and July saw the figure rose to 160,276 and 164,542 respectively. The country’s internet asset, which is being managed by NiRA, had witnessed remarkable growth over the last three years, even though many Nigerian websites are still registered with the foreign domain names.

This had prompted NiRA to set a target of one million active web addresses on the .ng domain name in five years, starting from 2019. However, the pace of growth has slowed down over the last year, thus casting a shadow of doubt over the one million target of NiRA.

Currently, Nigeria has one of the lowest registrations for the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) in the world. Nigerians’ preference for foreign domain names, especially, the United State’s .com has been the bane of the .ng, thus denying the country huge revenue from the national resource.

One of the reasons cited by web developers for not using .ng for their clients was cost. According to them, the cost of registering Nigeria’s .ng is far higher than that of the .com. While a .com domain name can be registered for as low as N2,000, a cheap .ng registration is sold for N11,000, while the premium names are sold for as high as N1 million. To encourage more Nigerian businesses to register online with the .ng domain, NiRA had, last month, announced a discount on the cost of registration for three months. According to the Association, the .ng promotion, which commenced on the 24th of August 2020, would be on until the 21st of November 2020.

“In January 2017, NiRA publicly declared a mechanism to be used for reducing prices of .ng domain names based on the number of actual .ng domain registrations at the second level, to stimulate the uptake of .ng domain name string and demystify the perception that .ng domain names are expensive. “This mechanism, which is known as the “NiRA Price Charter,” has been beneficial in reducing the price of .ng domain names for over three years now. However, in the light of the challenges being faced by many businesses in the COVID-19 era, NiRA desired to support businesses that require to take their products and services online,” NiRA stated.

“NiRA, therefore, offers, as a palliative in these tough times and in an effort to promote Nigerian businesses online, to make these businesses more competitive and available, an opportunity for all to register non-premium second level .ng domain names at a largely discounted price, for a limited period of three (3) months. “As NiRA operates the 3-R model (registry/registrar/registrant) of operations, members of the public are encouraged to contact participating NiRA accredited registrars for the registration of non-premium .ng domain names at the second level at the promo price and take advantage of this opportunity. There are terms and conditions attached to this promo,” it added.

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