Starting a web hosting company in Nigeria

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Posted by Felix Okoli on August 14, 2010 at 00:53:48:

Web hosting business can be big business if one has thousands of clients. This may probably be the reason why there are so many web hosting companies with websites in Nigeria. Just do a Google search for web hosting Nigeria and you would understand what I am saying.

Technically running a web hosting service in Nigeria can be quite challenging since you would need to have a team of experts working together to set up and keep the web server running 24-7. You would also need to have a reliable power plan and standby electricity supply. Perhaps due to the fact that electrical power supply is a major problem in Nigeria that's why a lot of web hosts in Nigeria are actually not hosting the webs in Nigeria but using a reseller plan from major and reliable web hosting companies like Godaddy, enom or Hostgator.
Starting a simple web hosting company in Nigeria can be much more successful if you are using a reseller plan, purchasing bulk plans by your credit card and reselling it at cheaper rates in Nigeria to your clients.
The hardest part of running a web hosting company in Nigeria is not getting your own customized domain name or setting up the website but actually getting customers and once you get customers, the challenge then becomes to maintaining them by providing good customer service. It can be practically impossible to have a good customer service when running a web hosting concern a one person and so one has to employ more staff to provide customer support as well as process manual orders.

Payment Options
When running a web hosting company, you should make an array of payment options available to you and you need to understand that Nigeria, being mostly a cash based economy, would make a profitable market to the web host if they equally accept cash payments for their services. So aside from allowing payment options like Paypal, Alertpay, Liberty reserve, 2checkout, Interswitch or Etranzact, you also need to be able to accept cash deposits at banks as this may be the source of where most payments would be coming to your company.

Incorporating your business
If you are just starting the web hosting business, maybe you may choose to do a test run to see if it will be profitable in the first 3 months or so and see how many clients you could get after making some advertising campaigns about your service. In the long run, you might need to incorporate in order to run your concern as a real business. This would give you access to a lot of things both from your providers as well as gain respect and trust from clients. Incorporation would give you a unique identity and limit your liabilites in the business such that it would no longer be seen as a one man business.

Shared hosting vs Dedicated web hosting
In the start up, offering share hosting services to small business may be attractive to a lot of people who just want to get on the web probably because they can be more affordable but for well established websites with large files and more traffic, in order to provide better services for them, offering them a means to migrate or just select Dedicated web hosting would be a good idea. It may be good to offer cheap and affordable hosting but you should not loose your clients who desire better and more reliable services by neglecting a dedicated web hosting service

Comments:
Re: Starting a web hosting company in Nigeria Posted by Ezzyhostng.com on Friday January 14, 2011 at 21:31:58:

Thanks for the tip, this article is more of an A to Z on web hosting business for all beginners. thanks