Last updated on August 9th, 2022 at 07:06 am
In this article, you will learn how to start a web hosting business in Nigeria as we go through the details of setting up a web hosting company successfully.
Before we continue, it is important you understand that a web hosting business is not a get rich quick scheme. It is just like most other businesses. You provide your customers with a service they need and you, in turn, get paid. It involves all the aspects of businesses, from operations to marketing to customer support. Like in other businesses, you need to put in a considerable amount of work in order to achieve success.
If you are ready to start your own web hosting business in Nigeria now, let’s dive right in.
What is a web hosting company?
Web hosting is a service that allows individuals and businesses to publish a website or application on the Internet. Every website that can be accessed via the world wide web has subscribed to one form of hosting or the other.
There are many types of web hosting available to website owners today. However, dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, and shared hosting are the three most popular. Each of them has its best use cases and advantages as well as cons.
Just like in physical businesses where business owners have to buy a space to create their products or to sell their products, web hosting works similarly. Web hosting is more or less space or say, a room that website owners rent to put their websites or web applications and their resources in. The companies that rent these spaces out are called web hosting companies.
Web hosting companies are businesses that help individuals and businesses get on the Internet. Also called web hosts, these companies rent out their technologies and resources to put websites on the Internet. This is to ensure that people can access the websites from anywhere in the world when they enter your website address into the browser on their phones and computers.
How web hosting companies work
It is important that you understand how web hosting companies do host websites on the internet. We will cover this briefly in this section.
As said earlier, a web hosting company rents out spaces on the web to websites. The websites use this space to store their code, files, images, resources, and pages which the web host now makes accessible by anyone who has access to the World Wide Web.
Web hosts do this by procuring and providing web servers to the websites. They usually work with individuals and business that can not afford or can not manage the resources- bandwidth, time, etc- needed to support their own web server,
Most web hosting companies maintain a large collection of themes, applications, plugins, and other resources that websites need to run smoothly. They also offer backup and database tools, all to make sure your site is running perfectly.
Most web hosting companies also offer related services including domain registration, SSL, email hosting, website builders, servers, and so on.
The opportunity for web hosting companies in Nigeria
If you are wondering if there is a market opportunity for web hosting companies, we will address this now.
With every single day that passes, the value and need for the internet increases, digital space has been growing at an unimaginable speed. More people are using the internet to satisfy their needs and more businesses and enterprises are using it to reach their customers. In fact, we are waking up to more uses of the internet across education, entertainment, research, and so on.
As it stands, the internet cannot exist without websites. Therefore, you can infer that as the internet is growing, the number of websites being created and managed is also increasing drastically. And as we already know, no website can exist without hosting. Therefore, the market for hosting services is not only large, it is rapidly increasing.
The situation is even more amplified in Nigeria when the digital wave is just starting to gain momentum. The current market in Nigeria is huge as a lot of businesses in Nigeria do not have websites yet. In addition, Nigeria has a population of over 200 million people and thousands of growing businesses,
One must however concede that the web hosting space is becoming crowded all over the world. While this will make it difficult to get customers, it is also proof that there’s a huge opportunity here.
Another upside is that the growth and expansion of a hosting company are unregulated and unhindered, Therefore, with the right marketing and partnerships, you can grow very fast.
How To Start A Web Hosting Business in Nigeria
Now, we will dive into how to actually set up your hosting business in Nigeria. There are different methods to start a web hosting company. The path you choose will depend on how much capital you have and management/human resources in place.
Acquire Your Own Servers
This the best option for people looking to start on a big note. This is the most expensive option as servers are cost-prohibitive, Maintaining them is even costlier. You will need a data center which will store the servers as well as provide them internet and power.
It is very expensive and hard to maintain, therefore it is not advised to start your web hosting company with this option.
Be a reseller
Most established web hosting companies offer programs that allow third parties to sell their services. This is called reselling. Reselling unlike the first option is very cheap and not labor-intensive. It is a very good way to start your web hosting journey as you can experiment before you finally get into the waters yourself.
Reseller hosting is the most affordable way to start your own web hosting business. As a result, it is becoming popular nowadays. It really is not far-fetched because you have the opportunity to make profits without making any major upfront financial/management investment.
Read more about how to get started as a hosting reseller here
Click here to become a hosting reseller
