(dot)ng Domain Name gets whopping price cut; now N15,000
Pamela Agboga
Nigerian websites are commonly identified by the .ng suffix, coming after .org, or .com, or .edu, since a direct .ng domain was rather expensive, selling for N7.5 million — but now, the situation has changed.
According to Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA), the body in charge of Nigerian domain names, the price to register for a .ng website name has dropped drastically from N7.5m to N15000, as of 8:00am today.
The Chief Operating Officer of NiRA, Ope Odusan, commenting on the new development said, “People don’t understand that .ng is Nigeria’s internet identifier on the internet. It is important that people have .ng instead of .com, org and .net web suffixes. Over 300,000 domain names are registered by Nigerians yearly leading to capital flight in excess of N300 million excluding the cost of packaging, hosting and fixing antivirus solutions on the sites.
“If you multiply that over a period of years, add the cost of hosting, designing and security solutions, it is a huge cost. We need to think about it. We have .ng, a unique domain name which we can use to get foreign money back to our country. If we have one million domain names sold to foreigners at $5 it is a huge investment into our economy.”
The move is also to encourage the growth of local web hosting firms, and get individuals or organization, to host websites with them. Some of the known hosting companies include:
