monitoring firm, Pingdom, has revealed that Africa accounts for only 2,670 (0.27 percent) of the top one million website globally.
Out of the world’s top 10,000 sites, only thirty-three are hosted in Africa, and among the top 100,000 sites, two hundred and fifty webs are hosted in Africa.
This report came at the heel of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) report which revealed that out of nearly 1,500 applications of new gTLDs, there are only seventeen applications from Africa which many suggested was a result of the cost of the applications being costly at $185,000 a pop.
According to Pingdom, Africa with its over 1 billion people, has reached a 13.5 percent Internet penetration rate, and there are plenty of big websites about the continent.
Of the 2,670 websites in Africa, South Africa accounts for over 69 percent (1,852 sites) of the sites in the top million, with Egypt in second place at over 10 percent (276 sites) followed by Morocco with 97 sites. Thirty-four countries in South Africa host one or more sites in the top 1 million sites.
Although Egypt lead the pack occupying the top two position with masrawy.com and ahram.org.eg respectively; South Africa accounts for five of the top ten website in Africa. The biggest site hosted in South Africa is news24.com, which lands in the number 3 place in the top 100 sites in Africa.
Altogether, fifty-eight of the top 100 biggest sites hosted in Africa can be found in South Africa. Egypt is in second place with 22 sites, followed by Seychelles with 7, Morocco with 5, Nigeria with 4, and Algeria, Kenya, Libya and Sudan each with one site, Pingdom reported.
It is however worthy to note that the top 100 sites hosted in Africa were identified and each of those sites were checked again before publication. Pingdom stated that web hosting is a “constantly moving target” and the location from where a particular site is hosted may have changed by the time of publication.
The statistics of the report are based on a collected data from June 6-8, 2012, with a Pingdom-developed script that scanned 945,472 out of Alexa’s top 1 million sites. The remaining sites failed for various reasons, Pingdom explained.
Pingdom noted that one encouraging conclusion that can be drawn from the study is that Africa is clearly capable of hosting busy websites, and not just in South Africa.
“So often when we see Africa mentioned in the tech headlines, it’s related to mobile technology and how it has taken off across the continent, And that’s a great development, but it’s worth remembering that however great that is, it still requires backend infrastructure, including web hosting” Pingdom says.
In an interview with Moneyweb; Pingdom’s Magnus Nystedt asserted that “It’s good news actually that we can either see that Africa and actually several countries in Africa are actually capable of hosting the websites. At least in some parts of the continent the infrastructure is there to support it.
It’s not as extensive as it is in North America, for example, in Europe and other parts of the world – but there is infrastructure there to support it. That side of it is actually good news, even though the percentage is very small.”
Source: Pingdom blog
