You probably know Emmanuel Oluwatosin, a Nigerian blogger, and entrepreneur. Probably, you know he runs a blog at www.yemma.com.ng He is one the few Nigerians to have started using .ng domains for their website 2 years ago. As a matter of fact, I have been admiring him for 2 years because his entire personal website/blog is run on a .ng domain.
One can only imagine the amount of content that is available to Nigerians who search through www.google.com.ng and select “pages from Nigeria”. Much of the content come from his blog. His tag-line says everything about him: “Emmanuel Oluwatosin: Inspiring Excellence, Realising Ambition”. According to him, he has about 500 posts on the blog.
The sad thing is this, for 2 weeks now, his website has been completely off-line because NIRA (the organization with the mandate to manage the .ng registry) deleted his domain name from their registry. According to him, no prior warning was given and upon query, they claimed he had mis-configured the server hosting the domain name. Now, what responsible organization would delete the service of a client without warning? If it was a technical issue, going by what they have said, why didn’t they email him, giving him an ultimatum to correct the problem?
Sadly, the gentleman has gone through much stress for two weeks now and has finally decided to move to a regular .com as soon as the .ng registry releases the domain name back to him.
To think that I had been promoting .ng domains http://www.web4africa.com.ng/why-register-.ng.php ? This sad occurrence is making me have a re-think.
When Nigerians start loosing faith in Nigeria, then you know that things have gone wrong, perhaps beyond repair.
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» Nigerian cc-TLD (.ng domains) - Something is definitely wrong - Oluniyi David Ajao » Blog Archive from Texas, United States
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Such things are inevitable in such a politicized system.
This is absolute nonsense. The registration process is already cumbersome as it is. Then people scale through and for such a lousy excuse as server mis-configuration, NIRA deletes a domain name. That site was a high traffic piece of virtual real estate!
David, you remember I was also promoting .ng domains, but I observed a few sites run on it and concluded it wasn’t worth the trouble, so we simply stopped pushing .ng.
It is a shame and the guys at NIRA need to wake up to the reality that they are not doing Nigerians any favours – free domains or not.
Seun, before now, I had been thinking you too should register a .ng for Nairaland and re-direct traffic to the .ng domain. As things are, I have to shut-up cos one never knows what flimsy excuse they’d come-up with tomorrow.
This recklessness on their part is completely un-acceptable.
Do they dare delete the .ng domain of a government agency, an ISP or leading news website like that? If the answer is NO, then why are they discriminating and metting this unfair treatment on a Nigerian?
This is awful, but not surprising. I thought his blog was great, and I’ve been wondering where it has gone.
I’m trying to work out what you meant by:
Is waiting for the .ng release necessary to park a .com domain on his host? That would be totally bizarre and a bureaucratic nightmare!
Meanwhile can his site be reached via just an IP address?
I see that yemma.com is taken, so perhaps we’ll see yemma-ng.com or similar.
Anyway, if you are reading this Emmanuel, good luck!
The domain name yemma.com.ng is hard-coded into the WordPress software that powers his blog. Thus, he cannot access the admin section of the blog, except through the domain name.
That answers your 2nd question too. Accessing the blog through an IP (without the domain) will not give you any functionality. Any click on any link will still point you to yemma.com.ng
He needs to edit his config.php file manually. When people are providing a service that they are not allowed to profit from, non-performance is guaranteed. What we need is a domain market rather than an NGO.
Thanks all for the concern and the comments. This week makes it 3 weeks that the domain has been off the net and I can only hope that it comes back up this week. I had the option of going for a .com domain from the onset but I chose to promote .com.ng even when it was not popular and all I could get is a deletion of my domain.
Aaron, I have some traffics already coming to that domain. All I want to do is to ensure that I don’t loose my traffic even when I change domain. I have been indexed by some sites already as well as search engines. I might even be changing the domain entirely when I register a .com but I need to do everything possible to protect the traffic my site already has. Else, I’d have to start from scratch over again. So, I am waiting for my domain to be back up…
The .com.ng is preferred if offering services to Nigeria. I don’t see any reason for a stressful registration process dat ppl go thru to register a .com.ng