Terrahost are shutting down their Nigeria location

chimichurri

Lagos, Nigeria closing down
Nov 12, 2022
We are very sorry, but we are closing down our Nigeria location.

Its with the deepest regrets that we need to inform you that we have come to the decision to close down our Lagos location in Nigeria.

We have tried for a year to get the location into a profitable state, but we have unfortunately been unsuccessful at the endeavor. In the end the location is very expensive to run, and we had to decide between putting more equipment in there, or cut our losses and close it down.

Unfortunately we have chosen to close it down in favor of growing our other locations, and possibly open new ones in the future. We thank you for believing in the location and we value you very much as our client.

What happens now?

Nobody is losing their server, but it will be migrated to our Amsterdam location. Your IP address will not change, and your bandwidth upgraded to unmetered, like the other locations. If you have BGP sessions with us, these will be reissued once we've moved routing to Amsterdam.

The process of moving your server will happen over the next few of weeks. In the event we cannot online migrate you, it will happen night time CET. If you have no important data on your server, you can also reach out to have your server recreated in Amsterdam to speed up the process. Again we thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,
The Terrahost Team

Personally I am unaffected, but I imagine this might make some people (like those seeking a global presence on the cheap) unhappy..

jtk

OneProvider has a Nagos location for $3/month with their OneCloud platform. 10GB SSD Storage,1 Core(s) 512MB Memory, 500GB @ 1Gbps.

Jab

@terrahost Can you shed some light - was it scale problem - you expected more people to show up or it was some price hikes / something out of ordinary for DC business that showed up later that make this no go in the end?

Like: ANY CRAZY STORIES?!

Personal note: More servers to Amsterdam, more equipment there, better BF deals in Europe!!1111 /s

root

I would also want to know the story about what did not work. Maybe we will learn something from this. What troubles me in this case is the sentence "the location is very expensive to run", because I did not know the prices (or maybe salaries) are so high in Nigeria, Africa.

JeDaYoshi

Wasn't Nigeria mainly routed to the UK in London anyways for the upstream networking, which didn't make it a good candidate for hosting in Africa? That was raised on OGF back then when the location launched, not sure if it still applied.

But yeah, I'm curious too about the actual reasoning behind it from @terrahost.

armandorg

@root said:
What troubles me in this case is the sentence "the location is very expensive to run", because I did not know the prices (or maybe salaries) are so high in Nigeria, Africa.

I'm pretty sure he does not mean about salaries.
What i've read is that internet is pretty expensive in there, at least for the their salaries.

MikeA

I would guess it's not a popular location and bandwidth expense is crazy.. Most people that want that location probably are getting cheap servers that don't pay for stuff. Local people probably won't need a VPS there and average salaries are 2-3x less than many European countries.

terrahost

Hello guys,

Its very simple, we did what we would to attract as many people to our services in Nigeria as possible. We even have people in Nigeria advertising locally for us, but the point of just breaking even wasn't even close unfortunately. It just did not work out as we planned. And now that renewals are coming up, we had a choice, do we keep losing money, or do we spend this elsewhere, perhaps opening another more attractive location?

We had ipNX as our first transit provider, but after 10 random outages within the first month we used a clause in our contract to get out of it. Luckily, HE.net was able to deliver transit to us within 48 hours (!). The downside was that most traffic was backhauled to London before routing elsewhere.

Terrahost is connected to IXPN, which is a regional Internet Exchange in Nigeria. This means most traffic to local ISPs are handed off there.

Whats expensive is really everything, but especially the rack, power, transit and oh, shipping into Nigeria. Our gear was stuck in customs for about a month, cause the right people needed to get the right amount of money. DHLs insurance specifically states its to PORT only in NG, now i know why. Surprisingly all our gear arrived at the datacenter intact.

Hope that gave you all some insight! And again, sorry for closing down the location. Hopefully the Amsterdam replacement works just as well for you.

TheDP

Your AMS location has been fine.

Just looking forward to your next expansion

root

@terrahost - thanks for the information. I highly appreciate you for being open about it.

In my opinion any expansion is great, whether is Nigeria, or some other interesting location from the globe.