Internet Solutions Nigeria (ISN) has been in business since 1997. As well as hosting services, it provides internet services and I.T. consultancy to customers in Nigeria and West Africa. ISN’s engineers are based at their Lagos headquarters, but the company also has offices in Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Abuja, and Accra (Ghana). The ISN website is in English.
Features and Ease of Use
ISN offers much more than just hosting, but to give you an idea of their hosting plans, here are the core features:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Automatic cloud backups; store up to 30 versions of your files
- Domain registration available
- SSL certificates available
- Unlimited disk space
It’s notable that ISN owns and operates its own Tier III data center, which means less than 1.6 hours of downtime per year. As well as providing a 99.999% uptime service level agreement, ISN also guarantees 99.982% availability thanks to its use of dual-powered equipment, multiple uplinks, advanced cooling, guaranteed power redundancy, and 24/7/365 on-site technicians.
Hosting plans are simple and geared towards beginners. For example, all hosting plans are compatible with WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. While ISN is responsible for DNS, firewalls, load balancers, storage, databases, servers, and the network (to ensure your website is always up-and-running), customers are responsible for the code, scripts, applications, data, and website security.
As well as unlimited disk space, the hosting plans are fully scalable due to being load-balanced on multiple servers, so you’ll be fine with ISN even if your website is prone to traffic spikes.
It’s reassuring to see that backups are well catered for by the company since ISN stores thirty versions of each of your files in a secure location, which you can access or download at any time from anywhere. It is surprisingly rare for a hosting company to provide such access to your backup files at no extra cost.
ISN also offers standard hosting services such as domain name registration, SSL certificates, SiteLock security, and custom email addresses. So, whilst ISN’s website looks pretty basic, rest assured that the company does offer all the usual hosting services. That is, apart from the one-click installer, website building tool, and support for advanced coding languages that you would expect from many other hosting companies.
Pricing and Support
Unusually for a shared hosting company, ISN does not advertise its prices or let you sign up online, so you have to email the company to request further information. However, their website has a payment section, which suggests you can pay for ongoing hosting once you become a customer.
I contacted the customer support team by email and Facebook to find out a price, and, unfortunately, I did not receive a reply. It’s certainly a frustrating sign-up process for me as a U.K. customer, but this may well be normal in Nigeria for all I know.
ISN offers customer service assistance from 9.00am to 5.00pm on Mondays through Fridays, and from 9.00am to 2.00pm on Saturdays, whilst technical support is 24/7/365. In addition to having several different telephone numbers and email addresses for contacting different departments, there are also different sets of contact details for the various branches located in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and Kano. This provider also maintains several up-to-date social media profiles.
