Cost of owning a domain name in Zambia
The cost of owning a domain name in Zambia varies from as low as $1 to over $50 dollars per year. And that will depend on where your domain registration is done that is either locally on servers here in Zambia or outside. What is a domain name?
A domain name is an identification string or text label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control within the Internet. And the purpose of domain names is to identify Internet resources, such as computers, networks, and services like Facebook, Twitter, or bloggers sites such as the one offering this technology news Lensesview or the one about Zambian football.
Domain names are structured in a hierarchy usually termed FQDN (Fully qualified domain). FQDN is the complete domain name for a specific computer, or host, on the internet and the hierarchy starts from the extreme right of the address. e.g mail.lensesview.com represents a fully qualified domain hosting mail at domain name lensesview with the top level domain at .com
Examples of TLD or top level domains are .com/ .org/ .net/ .zm/ .za/.
A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code.
Hence the ccTLD for Zambia is .zm and Zimbabwe is .zw and so forth. Now here is the interesting cost of owning domain name. To own a domain name with country code .zm is very expensive while in other countries it is not so.
In South Africa the country-specific domain name that is .co.za costs about 50 kwacha per year. In Zambia owning the country-specific domain, co.zm fetches around 800 kwacha.
It appears pricing differences come from the infrastructure in the specific country. Also notably it comes from lack of government policies driving the technology infrastructure.
This is why you find that it is easier such as for this blog and many others in Zambia to get a gTLD say .com rather than the ccTLD .co.zm. Firstly a Zambian specific domains are costly fetching around 800 Kwacha while .com costs merely $18usd which is 400 Kwacha or so.
Secondly to register Zambia specific domain name you have to go manual as you submit required copies through agents and usually take longer to register. gTLDs are faster and maybe automated in the registration.