AWS Africa Cape Town: the right default
For most Nigerian applications, AWS Africa (af-south-1, Cape Town) is the correct cloud region. At 40–80ms latency to Lagos, it is the closest major cloud region and significantly outperforms us-east-1 for Nigerian users.
Local Nigerian data centres
Rack Centre Lagos, MainOne, and MDXi provide local hosting for industries with data residency requirements: CBN-regulated fintech, health records and government data. More expensive than cloud, but mandatory for some regulated workloads.
What it costs
| Hosting type | Monthly (USD) |
|---|---|
| Shared hosting | $2–$15 |
| Managed VPS | $20–$80 |
| AWS EC2 t3.medium (af-south-1) | $35–$60 |
| Local DC (Rack Centre) | $200–$800+ |
| Enterprise cloud (scaled) | $500–$5,000+ |
Which one should you actually pick?
I'm not in a regulated industry. Do I need a local Nigerian data centre?
No. Unless you're handling CBN-regulated financial data, health records, or government data with a residency requirement, AWS Africa (af-south-1) is the better default: faster, cheaper, and easier to scale.
Is a $2-$15/month shared hosting plan ever the right call?
For a small brochure site with low traffic, yes. Once you add e-commerce, user accounts, or anything transactional, you'll outgrow it fast and end up migrating anyway.
What actually drives the jump from managed VPS to enterprise cloud pricing?
Traffic volume, the number of services you're running (database, cache, background jobs), and whether you need redundancy across multiple servers, not just raw storage.
Can I start cheap and move to AWS or a local data centre later?
Yes, and it's common. Most businesses start on managed VPS or shared hosting and migrate once traffic or compliance requirements demand it.
MANAGED FOR YOU
Zozzah manages cloud hosting for Nigerian businesses
AWS, GCP, and local data centre management. You focus on the business.