.com.ng vs .sch.ng vs .ng — which one should your school use?

1. Who runs Nigerian domains

Everything ending in .ng is managed by NiRA, the Nigeria Internet Registration Association. You do not buy from NiRA directly; you buy through an accredited registrar, the same way you would buy a .com through a company rather than from ICANN.

That matters for one reason only: the registrar is who you deal with when something goes wrong, and the registrar is who holds the record of who owns the name. Everything else in this guide follows from that.

2. The endings, one by one

.sch.ng — made for schools

This is NiRA's ending for primary and secondary schools, and it is the most honest choice: a parent seeing greenfieldacademy.sch.ng knows immediately what it is. Because far fewer people use it, the name you actually want is usually still available — which is rarely true of .com.

NiRA intends it for schools, and may ask for evidence that you are one. In practice that is not a hurdle for a real school with a CAC registration or a state approval letter.

.com.ng — the everyday choice

The most widely used Nigerian ending, for businesses of every kind. It is the cheapest of the three, and it is what most Nigerians type without thinking. Nothing about it says "school", but nothing about it says "not a school" either.

.ng — short and premium

The shortest and the most expensive. greenfield.ng looks sharp on a signboard and on a school bus. If the budget is there and the name is free, it is a fine choice — but it buys you appearance, not visibility.

.edu.ng — not for you

This one causes real confusion, because schools see it and assume it is the "education" ending. It is not available to primary or secondary schools: NiRA restricts it to accredited tertiary institutions — universities, polytechnics and colleges of education. If a vendor offers to get you one, be careful about what else they are telling you.

3. What they cost

Roughly, per year, at the time of writing. Prices move with the naira and differ between registrars, so treat these as the shape of the thing rather than a quote:

Two things worth knowing. First, Nigerian endings renew at the same price they start at — unlike many international endings, which advertise a cheap first year and then quietly triple. Second, a domain is an annual cost for as long as you want the website, not a one-off purchase. Budget for it the way you budget for a subscription.

4. How to choose in two minutes

People agonise over this, and there is very little to agonise about. Work down the list and stop at the first yes:

1. Is the name you want free as .com.ng? Take it. Cheapest, most familiar, done.
2. Taken, or does your name need the word "school" doing some work? Take the .sch.ng.
3. Is the school's name short and the budget comfortable? The .ng will look good for years.

What should not influence you: search rankings. Google does not rank .sch.ng above .com.ng or the other way round. What moves you up the page is having pages worth reading, a site that works on a phone, and being registered with Google — not the three letters at the end of the address.

5. Choosing the name itself

The ending matters less than the name in front of it. A few rules that have saved schools a lot of grief:

• Say it down a phone line. If a parent cannot spell it back to you after hearing it once, it is the wrong name.
• No hyphens if you can help it. greenfield-academy-ikeja is a nightmare to read aloud and gets mistyped constantly.
• Drop the filler. "International", "Group of Schools", "Nig. Ltd" — leave them for the letterhead.
• Think about the next campus. If you may open in another town, greenfieldacademy travels; greenfieldikeja does not.
• Match what people already call you. If everyone says "Greenfield", do not register "GFA International Schools".

6. The mistake that costs schools their website

This is the part to read twice, because it is the single most common way a Nigerian school loses its website — and it has nothing to do with which ending you chose.

A domain has a registrant: the legal owner on record. When a school asks a web designer, a parent or an agency to "sort out the website", the domain is very often registered in that person's name, on their account, with their email as the contact. Everything is fine until the relationship ends, the person becomes unreachable, or the renewal notice goes to an inbox nobody checks. Then the domain expires, the website and every @yourschool email address stop working at once, and the school discovers it has no standing to recover the name it has been printing on uniforms for six years.

Everything else is recoverable. A design you dislike can be changed, a host you outgrow can be swapped, content can be rewritten. A domain registered in somebody else's name is the one thing you may simply not get back.

Schoolpager registers every domain in the school's name — never ours — and invoices the renewal to you sixty days before it expires, so nothing lapses quietly.

7. Questions