Pan-African web hosting company, Web4Africa, has launched the first West African mirror project aimed at providing a local mirror of popular open-source projects in Nigeria.
The Nigerian Mirror Project, which is physically hosted in Nigeria, will reduce the high cost of bandwidth by bringing free and open-source content closer to end-users in Nigeria through data mirroring. Access to bandwidth in Nigeria is expensive compared to most parts of the world, and this is mostly due to the fact that most of the content consumed by Nigerian Internet users is generated outside the country. With this Mirror Project, free and open-source software will become more available, and user experience will be made better with faster downloads.
“This project, in addition to the immense benefits it brings to the Internet ecosystem in Nigeria, is one of our ways to give back to the local Internet community and is only a first step,” says Oluniyi Ajao, Managing Director of Web4Africa.
Right now, the mirror hosts the full repositories of Ubuntu, CentOS (both on Linux operating systems), and the Python Package Index in Nigeria. It’s been officially recognised by Ubuntu and CentOS and has been integrated into their official distribution network.
Seeing as this is a new project, suggestions regarding what other operating systems and open-source software should be mirrored in Nigeria are currently being taken. So if you have any, you can send a mail to admin@mirror.ng.
