A vast array of entrepreneurial opportunities are rapidly surfacing across the African business landscape, owing to the aggressive growth witnessed in the IT sector. From mobile money, to social and business app development, the list of opportunities abound to a new crop of African entrepreneurs are endless.
One of such is Web Hosting; a simplistic service that provides website accessibility for individuals and businesses. WhoGoHost is a Nigerian-based firm that targets customers and clients seeking this simple but unique service.
In a recent chat with Ventures Africa, Toba Obaniyi, CEO of WhoGoHost speaks on the journey – challenges and successes – towards developing a multi-million dollar web hosting firm.
VA: Can you tell us about yourself?
A: My name is Toba Obaniyi. I’m the CEO of WhoGoHost. As an introduction, WhoGoHost was started by Ope Awoyemi, co-founder of Jobberman while he was still a student at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife. At that time, it was one of the things one could use to make some money by the side.
WhoGoHost was not really a business that one could use to make ends meet and at that time and there were no serious hosting companies. WhoGoHost started eventually as a serious business and got incorporated and when we started the company as a very serious business to ensure that we grow and we expand accordingly.
Since we have been running we have experienced tremendous growth that has proven that the market is there and we haven’t even scratched the surface yet. So we are very hopeful that in the next couple of years, hosting in Nigeria will be a major player in the I.T industry because as we all know I.T is gradually becoming the in-thing in Nigeria as it is all over the world, and you cannot do too much without having a server or hosting provider.
Most web developers right now are dependent on our international counterpart possibly because of the sense of mediocrity that all people believe the business in Nigerian have. Actually they will prefer to work with international companies but one of the strategies we have tried to put in our business is the fact that we can deliver quality in Nigeria too. Not all businesses in Nigeria are mediocre and we’ve proven that to our customers and we’ve seen quite a number of people shifting from international providers to us. We believe in the next few years, we will become serious player in Africa and possibly the rest of the world.
VA: How would you define WeGoHost as a company?
A: WGH as a company as you know is a web-hosting company. Our dream and vision is to become the top-notch and number one service provider in Africa. To define us I think, our core value is providing the very best of service to our customers and ensure their satisfaction, and to make that happen we are building a customer support team that can attend to all customer needs and I think that has always been our major focus because we do realize as Nigerians and in the Nigerian market that customer service is very poor. So we’ve actually invested so much in building our customer support team to be able to attend to the needs of the users and this would pay off at the long run… actually it is already paying off. And that is what set us aside and different from most of our other counterparts.
VA: What year did WGH start?
A: Officially we started a year ago, a year plus, but before that we’ve actually been in business but we were not incorporated then but we got incorporated a year ago a year plus ago. The name then was operational, that was still about five or six years when Ope Awoyemi started it. If you know Opeyemi, he is the co-founder of Jobberman, you will know that he’s a fantastic entrepreneur; he sees ideas and make things happen. But one of the things that he needs is when he gets a business idea sometimes he needs people to help him push it to the next level and that’s where I came in. One the things we discussed was that if we wanted to go to the next phase we had to go beyond a person and become a proper business and so that’s one of the things I did when I came in. We incorporated the business and we started running it like that.
VA: Can you tell us a few of your success stories so far?
A: Let’s put it this way, maybe I’ll start with our journey. Well, Opeyemi has done a good job in making WGH known to a number of web developers, so we already have a customer base even though it was very small. My job was to make people trust us and to build our capacity and so those are things we started doing, especially when we became incorporated and then we started letting people know about us. The milestones that we achieved eventually due to that was when Google started the GNBO initiative (Get Nigerian Businesses Online), Google’s idea around that was to get more local content but to achieve that they needed a partner and we were contacted by Google to partner with them alongside different providers to sell domain names to people who will get the site builder, naturally that was like a statement of proof we are for real. The challenges that our kind of business have is the fact that people don’t know you, sometimes they get scared to trust you with their site. They fear that you could just close up shop tomorrow but when we became one of the certified vendors for Google it increased our publicity and people trusted us more and eventually we grew and then became Google Apps resellers, accredited Google Aps resellers, that means we actually sell Google Apps to Nigerian businesses.
The process of getting accredited is not really easy and adding that to our current partnership with Google of course increased our value, so to speak. People trusted us even more. Right now, we are accredited resellers for SoftLayer, an IBM company in Netherlands. What that means is that we sell servers for companies that want to get on their behalf. Of course, aside from the regular business we already do. So those kinds of things that make people know that we are real, we see ourselves providing better services in future and getting whatever accreditation that would make people know that we are actually genuine and we are actually serious people.
VA: Can you name some of the top sites in Nigeria that you have hosted for?
A: Well, we provide servers for Ekiti State Government, for Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) Ile-Ife, off the top of my head I can’t remember some but we also provide domain services for GTBank, Union Bank, Fidelity Bank, and we’ve had quite a number of customers. We have over 7,000 active users right now, what that means is that we have quite a number of users and we are planning to grow that very quickly and very fast . According to webhosting.com where they basically measure the number of sites hosted by certain companies, we are regarded to be the largest hosting company in Nigeria and of course, what we are trying to accomplish, as I said initially when we started is that the market is ripe but we have very few players.
To achieve that we are trying to build our strength and build our staff to handle the load we are expecting in the nearest future.
VA: Is there any other web hosting that has rated you as the largest host apart from webhosting.info?
A: None that I’m aware of. Webhosting.info is the only popular one that I know of, because it checks the number of hosting to the provider and uses that to measure how many sites that is hosting with that provider. It may not be completely accurate because it only considers .com and .org; it’s simply the global top level domains. That means it doesn’t count .ng domains but it gives an idea, which is usually true because most people usually get .com and .org, it gives an idea of how large your web hosting is.
VA: What is your staff strength?
A: At this time we have the staff strength of six persons, and we are planning to grow that even faster. Right now we offer 24/7 support during the weekdays and we also offer support during the weekends. We are planning to grow support to 24/7 all year round, that’s part of the strategy that we have, but for now, we are offering 24/7 support to our customers during the weekdays.
VA: What do you think you did differently that has fostered your growth?
A: I guess one the things we did differently is the fact that we made some right moves, right partnership with Google at that time. Some people saw Google as a competition because some fear that Google’s success will mean the end of hosting in Nigeria. While we saw it that the service Google was offering was not going to completely eliminate the service we are offering. They were offering site builders but not everybody there would need a site builder, some there would need a regular hosting account to do much more. We didn’t see that as competition, so we worked alongside Google. Asides that I think the most important thing has been our support because as I mentioned earlier, our support is the most important thing for us and we are trying as much as possible to ensure that we give the best of that. The feedbacks we’ve gotten generally from our customers alone have been very impressive. Some people wonder if we are actually Nigerians because people assume that once it’s Nigerian it’s going to be bad.
The truth is this, I must confess that sometimes it’s difficult to communicate with customers, since customers have the mindset that you are going to fail them, sometimes they come aggressive at the very beginning and it makes it a lot difficult communicating with them but we’ve been able to handle such issues and gather trust, what that means is that when people trust us, they refer us to other people and people refer us to other people. That’s been really our success story.
VA: Has there been issues like customers being unhappy due to poor service?
A: The truth of the matter is that, that can never be eliminated. We have a feedback mechanism that where the customer or client can give us constant feedback on how they’ve enjoyed our services or of they have any issues with our services. Most of them that have had issues are pertaining to the fact that a customer does not understand the service we are offering. I will give an illustration, you have a customer who registers only a domain name and we try to make the customer understand that for whatever he needs, he needs to host an account. The customers calls us frauds that the domain name is all he wants and he needs it the logging details and when we try to explain and I can assure you, when this kind of thing happens we always look diligently to check if there was any miscommunication. When we try to explain to the customer and the customer does not listen and ask for a refund. So those are the issues that we do have sometimes with some of our customers. Some are impatient and we can understand that Lagos aspect. And Nigeria is a stressful place because we are Nigerians they don’t trust you right from the beginning. So when they get any impression that you are going to cheat them, they get defensive immediately due to their faults. Those are the challenges we usually have most of them are very few due to our issues but they usually come but we try to resolve them as quickly as possible but our feedback mechanism has really helped to get an idea or how customers are feeling and enjoying our services. Recently we have also introduced the system where we actually call customers that have registered with us for a period of time, to ask them if they are enjoying our services and give us feedback of what they are getting. Everything is to help us to learn from our mistakes, to prove and probe. As I said again, our support is our greatest strength we don’t play with it. So we are trying to build our strength.
VA: How fast do you respond to queries?
A: On our support channels we have chat, tickets and we have phone calls. How fast? We respond as quickly as possible. Why I said we respond as quickly as possible is because it depends on the queue size at the time. From experience, there are some peak periods, when a lot of tickets come in to let’s say from 11am to like 3pm, so during those periods we have shift system with two or three support staff at the same time attending to request using the different media of communication but we do attend to client as quickly as possible. Everything really depends on the queue size at the moment.
VA: One issue people always have with Nigerian companies when it comes to internet is security. How secure is your server?
A: First of all, I will like to say that our servers are not in Nigeria, our servers are hosted in Amsterdam, Netherlands and what that means is that the fact that we are a Nigerian hosting company doesn’t mean that we have the best server in the world and in our circles but even beyond that we have also employed experts to help us to put in the necessary features to ensure that our servers are top notch and secure. But the truth of the matter when it comes to hosting, and one of the things we try to advise our client is that when it comes to security of hosting account, most times when your site is hacked, the issue is not because the server is insecure. There’s an illustration we love to use, imagine you have an ATM card with a particular bank, the bank has put all necessary features to secure it; hackers cannot hack into your account through the back but when you get careless with your ATM card and your pin anybody can gain access to your bank account. So regardless of the security features that exist in the backend, you have the obligation to ensure that your bank account is secure. So the same applies with hosting. We’ve put the necessary standard security procedures. I won’t want to bore you with some of them, but I will give you an illustration; some of the attempt that hackers try to do is brute-forcing; what that means is that if the hacker tries to get your password, the hacker will just run a script or keep trying different combinations, we have solutions that ensures that when that happens the IP address is blacklisted, but of course that could have a backlash on legitimate client because sometimes clients put in the wrong details and then they get blacklisted. When that happens we restore their IP as soon as possible but I’m just giving you an idea of some of the security features we have there are quite a number of technical things to ensure that a server is secure and to ensure is always updated so that the server is secure.
VA: Where do you see webhosting in Nigeria in the next five years?
A: In the next five years, I see WhoGoHost partnering with a data centre in Nigeria. I see WGH providing proper server services to probably banks and other institutions that need local serves in Nigeria. I see WGH becoming a de-facto when we talk about hosting in Nigeria and in Africa. I see WGH actually spearheading the development of hosting in Africa as a whole and inviting investments from within and outside the nation and the continent as well. So, I do have very big dreams for WGH as it is, and it may seem like a slow start but we will eventually get there and I think one of the things people always want to see is the potential of the market and the potential is right there. Once we are able to prove that with our success stories, we would eventually let those out there put up a strategy to have a data centre in Nigeria sooner that they initially planned.
