.us domains is $8.48 (N1687.94), .ch domains is $14.99 (2983.76). so why the hell is .ng domain name N13,500 on whogohost for one year. look at the gap what is so special, what do you think?
Because it can be used to create interesting vanity domain names. Now I like your comparison with .us since is also falls in that same category - where you modify English words to make them present continuous (sexti.ng) or create a forced adjective (bootylicio.us)
.us however, has been in existence for 35 years now but the demand for it just wasn’t there. American businesses preferred the .com instead. You know that little thing they say in Economics 101 about demand and pricing. Now, .ng was introduced at a time when .com had become crowded, and everyone was pretty much into domain hacks to sound cool. That essentially made .ng a premium tld from the get go. I mean, notable patrons before its general availability include Microsoft (bi.ng) and Google (googli.ng)
EDIT: Doesn’t help that our greedy NiRA pretty much saw it as a money making venture too. They saw the opportunity and I dare say, overcapitalized on it. Who basically sits down and sets aside all the words in the dictionary as ridiculously overpriced premium domain names? This document was from when the tld was introduced. http://www.nira.org.ng/Premium_Domain_Names.pdf
The names still available on that list now sell at 15k now though.
6 Likes
I also have the same concerns as @udemesamuel. @Xolubi why then was the .com.ng still not high-priced? I can’t imagine bootstrapping my startup and then paying 75k (5yrs) for a .ng domain when I can pay 12.5k for a .Com.ng equivalent.
When you have less than 80,000 domains and executives who wanna high roll you price at 15k per. NG domain. They should be making it easy for people to register domains not making it harder.
Honestly I think the pricing is too exorbitant. I strongly think they would make more money if it’s placed around 5k. I wanted to register a .ng domain but when I saw the price I had to consider the .com.ng equivalent.
Wow i missed the party, the government agencies just finds ways to reap the poor, young startup gues with less or no cash will buy domain name for N15,000 (we are not from wealthy homes) by the way this will kill innovation in Nigeria if they migrate it to .com.ng and .com in nigeria by the way try registering your domain in a foreign hosting company, it does not go though anymore for .com.ng and .ng domains or it is it me just noticing it in namecheap, has anybody noticed that?
You’re so right. As someone who is currently bootstrapping my startup, I did not even look at dot ng twice.
Went with a dot com. Way cheaper abeg
1 Like
Noticed it too when I tried to register my domain name on Namecheap. I did not even bother. Went with a dot com
Ermm, present continuous (sexti.ng)?
Anyways, .ng is unnecessarily expensive. I was wondering why Asus (the computer and electronics company) didn’t register as.us?
Did I spell something wrong?
A question which has already been answered. Also, they are a Taiwanese company.
It was not until 2003 with the launch of del.icio.us that people realized they could do vanity domain names. Still, the concept didn’t catch on until about 2009 and beyond.
Expensive, yes. Unnecessarily? I don’t think so. The entirety of my initial response was to explain why this is the case. And if we want to go by comparison to other countries’ tlds, .ht (Haiti) goes for $149 for instance. A number of countries are $49 and above. I mean, its a yearly rate. I honestly don’t get the fuss.
You’ve got a point though. 
1 Like
Unnecessarily expensive yes. The most successful registry in Africa is co.za with over a million domains. Their domain prices are a big reason why. It was priced cheaper than anything on godaddy. That plus the co.za guys let it grow by bootstrapping from a long time ago before it became a profit engine. NIRA are overstaffed and full of people looking for a big salary. They do not have the patience or sacrifice to grow. NG to
10 million domains even as 97 million Nigerians used the internet last year. There are that many businesses in Nigeria but if the price of getting online is steep why bother?
1 Like
You are reaching a bit there. .com.ng is what you should compare .co.za with. It’s dirt cheap, largely overlooked, and goes to show pricing isn’t the only reason for .co.za's success. The South African registry has been doing a better job of instilling a sense of pride in using .co.za domains over .com since the mid 90s.
Meanwhile for the longest time, the sole contact for .ng domain names was one Randy Bush. Registration was also super cumbersome - tried getting a .com.ng in 2006? It wasn’t worth the effort, price regardless. It is the reason why Nigerian web properties grew used to appending -ng or ng to their .com domain names.
You just like wahala.
Lol, how now?
You just gather, settle dey quote the guy paragraph by paragraph. Choi.
.Co.za had nothing to do with love of country but making a product widely available and accessible. It helped that South Africa had everything Nigeria didn’t have and still doesn’t have like widely available and affordable broadband internet. They had DSL when all NITELs ambition was to loot and collect fee for people queing in order to make a call.
Today Nigeria has outside investors to.thank for basic mobile broadband. It now has a chance to develop a basic local internet domain industry.
About NIRA at the end of the day its a value proposition for anybody to get a domain name. Who pays 15,000 a year to register their business offline? So is. NG worth that amount? For most no. The pricing for a mass market has to be right and the patience has to be there.
About Randy Bush quit the nationalistic BS. He contributed to a lot of registries and internet development in Africa. His spirit of community service is what a lot of the greedy execs at Nira should imbibe.
1 Like
Well, when it comes down to what is really important, are cool domain hacks like sleepi.ng or talki.ng worth it? I don’t think so.
Please, show me the nationalistic BS in my post about him or how I tried to undermine his person. All I tried to point out was how NiRA didn’t take the helm until 2009 (.co.za was already popular way before this time) and how difficult it was to get domain names pre re-delegation.
EDIT: Also, let’s not get overly dramatic here. .ng is not the only way to get your business online. Blaming the reason for not having a website on the fact that it costs 15k is just silly. Nigerian businesses already had websites before 2013.
You allude to ng domain name registration being difficult under randy bush pre NIRA. Well it was the same process Co.za used for a long time and network solutions which was one of the first registrars. The only difficulty was the fact that there were Zero in country hosting providers. Consequently, there was Zero awareness. This is why many chose to register on dot Com.
About NIRA I remember contributing to the rfc of what became some of its initial policies and pricing. I argued for a lower pricing than the much higher amount that was suggested. Luckily Ndukwe Kalu RIP keyed into that which is why dot Com dot NG was priced low.
But the greed was there in Nira to grab and not let the ecosystem flourish. The initial idea of registering at the. Ng level was to fleece corporates. They calculated that if they could sell punch.ng for 1000 usd and did that for x corporates they would hit financial goals. Nowhere was the thought of bootstrapping and letting the industry develop according to local needs until it transformed into a golden goose.
Again it requires patience, perseverance and sacrifice. Nigerians are too often in a hurry to get rich overnight without putting in the work. The Us government funded the internet for close to 20 years before it took off. People contributed standards, telcos and universities contributed network equipment Free. Nira is a non profit and should act like one. Its goal should be internet name domain development in Nigeria not trying to cash in.
2 Likes