Domain Name Registration in Nigeria
To own a website and be taken seriously online, you need to register a domain name. It costs about $10 per annum or N3,000 is you go through a Nigerian third party to register/renew your domain name. If you are trying to build a business, then there is no way round it. Nobody will take you serious with www.geocities.com/marybeads or www.marybeads.blogspot.com. It shows that you are not serious, and you can evaporate at the twinkling of an eye.
In choosing a domain name, choose www.yourcompanyname.com if you are buiding a business, and the shorter, the better so that people can remember it easily. So go for short memorable names; avoid long names. Most short names names are gone, so you may consider adding "ng" to clinch it. With respect to name extension, stick with .com or .com.ng if you want to restrict your focus market to Nigeria. If you are just building a website and not a business, then you can go for .net, .biz etc. People take you serious if you are a .com. Going with other extensions spells .com is gone, and you are not the real deal, but a copy.
Also, avoid a hyphen in your domain name like the plague. If you cannot get www.maybeads.com, you can settle for www.marybeadsng.com instead of www.mary-beads.com. It does not come across as very professional. Again, if you are building a hobby site with intent to make money in the future, you can get by with a hyphen, but if you are building a website for Mary Beads Limited, then you are much better off without a hyphen.
It is best to register your domain name by yourself, and be the custodian of your control panel username and password. Do not fall for the temptation of the convenience of a turnkey solution, someone else carrying out the domain name registration, web design and hosting. Even if a company is designing your website for you, register the domain name by your self. If your relationship goes sour, you cannot take control of your domain name without knowing who the registrar is, your username and password.
Also note that you have to renew your domain name annually. You have the option of paying for 2 - 10 years upfront. That way, you do not have to bother about annual renewal. If your renewal falls due, and the grace period expires, you will lose your domain name to a predator who is only interested in holding you to ransom. He will snap up your domain name, and wait for you to come crying, so that he can demand a princely ransom.
If you have built a big site with the reputation that goes with it, the worst thing that can happen to you online is to lose your domain name. You are back to ground zero. If your hosting account is shut down for whatever reason, your site will be off for a couple of days while you get a new hosting account and upload your files back. You will lose face slightly, but can quickly get back into the game. But if you lose your domain name, you disappear completely. You lose your search engine rankings and links that were pointing to your old site. You are saddled with a new e-mail address, and will have to go back to all the people you know to advise them of your new e-mail address. Basically you start from scratch, the only advantage being that since you have walked this way before, you know what to do to build back your business. So many Nigerian companies have lost their domain name one time or the other. Their loss was minimal, as they don't operate via the internet.
In the light of the forgoing, make sure if your are using a third party, confirm you will have a separate control panel where you can choose your user name and password. Also, as a safeguard, it is better to use a different webhost from your domain registrar. That way, you can point your domain to any host that you want. More on this in the article on web hosting.
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