Nigerian web hosting companies, over the past few years, have increased in number and grown in size. As more people demand for these services and more businessmen notice the opportunity, hosting companies spring up. Some grow, and others simply either decide to stay where they are or have services poor enough to get them repeatedly rejected.
And as with every other business, such an increase has its pros and cons. Especially when the Nigerian’s running these web hosting companies start to ignore best practices and industry standards. However, I would not be speaking on any particular company today. I would do that in my upcoming review of Nigerian Web Hosting Companies.
So lets discuss some of the common features of Nigerian web hosting companies.

They All are Resellers

Web hosting resellers are companies that buy web hosting space or rent them from larger hosting companies. And then resell them to customers.
Although not a bad feature, especially since very few web hosting companies actually have their own servers, there are down sides that you should be aware of, so you don’t get angry when some things happen

1. Server Downtimes are Possible

Don’t pay attention to things like “99.9% uptime guaranteed”. That’s bollocks. I’ve hosted several different domains now for over five years and I still get server downtimes. Although this mostly happens with one particular web hosting company, lips sealed.

2. Security Issues

Though companies try to get this right as much as they can, you can never really bank on security on shared servers. Your best bet is to beef up your site’s security. Especially if you use an open source framework such as WordPress. Once a few steps are taken though, you can sit back for a bit and relax. Most hackers just move on to the next site when popular exploits don’t work.

So if you need to have a reliable site, as in, really reliable, like an ecommerce site, I don’t advice going all patriotic on hosting companies. Hostgator seems to be accepting our cards. Try them out, but be sure to contact them first and understand the requirements.

They mostly have poor customer service

I’m sure this would come as no surprise to you. But in an IT environment, this sometimes has major kickbacks. I get angry calls from clients from time to time saying things like “my server is down” and “this plugin isn’t working”, and then I contact the webhost and guess what, it takes forever to fix. Things have gotten better over the years though. Companies are learning to deal with their customers problems. But before you sign up with a webhost, I recommend sending their customer service people a mail and measuring the response time. I like to do that a lot for web-based service providers. One particular company hasn’t replied my mail in three months. I can’t imagine how much trouble that mail saved me.

Don’t get sad though, I’m sure there are some really cool Nigerian web hosting companies out there, none that I have tried so far. Lets hope I stumble on one soon enough. I have used three, quite popular, Nigerian web hosting companies so far. I have been insulted in a very polite way by one, hacked on another, before the site went live, thank God, and ignored by the third. Right now I just use two and I have learned to fend for myself.

Had any experience with Nigerian web hosts, share them with us.