How I host my websites from Nigeria

Posted by Felix Okoli on Wednesday April 3, 2013 at 10:18:17:

I have a couple of websites and hosting them efficiently and economically have been the two most important deciding factors when choosing a web hosting service.

Initially when I started up my first website, I tried out a couple of web hosting companies in Nigeria and some were quite expensive while others were quite cheap but they were still a lot of limits on them such as uptime efficiency, cost, disk space as well as too many restrictions.

The web hosting services being offered by many local Nigerian web hosts were hampered by a couple of Nigerian factors with the top one being inefficiency power supply. For a while, I endured hosting with some of them but after a while when I checked up my website by 12 midnight, I noticed that it was offline for many hours in-spite of the fact that I paid for a 24 hr premium service. That only meant that I was losing traffic by staying with the local web host even though it offered me the convenience of paying in naira.

Actually one of the reasons why I stuck with a couple of web hosting companies in Nigeria was because Visa and Mastercards were not readily available then as there are now. In order to get a credit card back then, one would have to pay a higher rate to get a VCC from a local vendor in Nigeria. I already knew a couple of fantastic web hosts with solid presence on the web based in the US which offered better service.

When hosting my website in Nigeria, I have to pay for hosting for each of my domain names separately but all that changes when I switched to an American based company where they actually have 24 hrs electricity.

Bluehost is the first US based web hosting company that changed my experience and even made my website more efficient. I could run more scripts, get more comprehensive stat reports, have almost 100% uptime, host unlimited domains and so on. I only have to pay for a single web hosting plan and do a lot of things with it.

To host my website with my account at Bluehost, all I needed were a Nigerian issued USD debit card, internet service and my already bought domain names pointing to Bluehost name servers - ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com.

Web hosting with bluehost costs about $6.95 per month and for a year that amounts to about $84 per year.

Bluehost web hosting suits me because it allows me to share web hosting resources across multiple websites while paying a fixed rate. Perhaps, when hosting a single website, it may be a bit expensive but if you are into managing multiple sites, shared hosting seems to be the best.