Paga is the #1 mobile money company in Nigeria with over 600,000 users, making it easy to make payments, send money or receive money online and offline OR on the move using your mobile phone.

One of our core goals at Paga is to make it more convenient for you to access and use your cash anywhere and at anytime.
— Tayo Oviosu (CEO, Paga)

We love what they’re doing, a total revolution of how cash is handled in Nigeria. The amazing service they render is unrivalled with the following benefits.

• Free Transactions between Paga accounts.
• Free Transactions with Merchants.
• Free Transaction when loading wallet using Debit Cards
• Easy Withdrawal of cash through banks/agents

We now accept payments via Paga, simply choose Paga Wallet as your means of payment during your next order. Payments with Paga have no transaction fees.

You can also pay off any existing invoice with your Paga Wallet; open up the invoice from your GigaLayer billing account and change the payment option to Paga Wallet.

It gets better, signup an account with Paga; load your wallet and register domain names, renew hosting accounts or buy VPS servers conveniently. All payments with Paga Wallet are automatically processed!

Thank you for choosing GigaLayer; next invoice… #JustPagaIt

—
Ahmad Mukoshy, 
Founder/CTO GigaLayer.

After spending endless man-hours and cash, coding and designing websites, many spend even more money trying to launch these sites through expensive, but limited advertising campaigns (don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that when you have VC backing); If you have ever seen Konga and Jumia adverts “following you around” on the internet, they’ve got VCs!.

For those who haven’t (yet) got that much of cash to spend, you might want to consider a more stringent approach to advertising your websites effectively. This article will explore the top 7 ways of building web traffic  without spending much.

1. Create Content:
   The importance of the content of your website cannot be over emphasized. Content is king, thus you should furnish your writing skills and of course write what Google would love to index. 
   
   Write perfectly, write relevant. Analyse successful blogs and see their writing and presentation methods. You can learn best by learning from examples.
   
   You should create something of value that people will want to pass on to others, quality postings assures the loyalty of your visitors, post more and more engaging stuff that would lure people to comment. Simply create engaging content that your audience can easily relate to.
   
   Close your posts with an invitation to comment, be open minded because different people have different opinions and guess what, they are entitled to them?, so if the criticism is helpful, embrace it.
   
   
2. Be Present:
   Content is king but sometimes your online presence is the door which might bring luck to your business. You have to build powerful online presence, building a strong presence is actually building a reputation for your website.    
   
   Increase the amount of your content, e.g. if you used to update once a week, increase to twice a week. Create your presence in all major social media websites and make back-links to your post or pages. Share your new posts and updates regularly on social media websites as often as you can.
   
   But be human, respond to likes and comments, it can be understood if comments are too much and not responded to not vice versa. Your responses validate your presence!
   
   
3. Optimize Your Site:
   Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vast term, however, I would emphasize on 1 of the ways to optimize your website to be search engine friendly using keywords!
   
   A keyword is any word or short phrase that describes a website’s topic or page. The more a keyword is used by web users and websites, the more attraction power it has. Google has keyword Generator you can use to get of your site’s keywords
   
   Back to layman’s understanding. So, SEO is simply the process of getting traffic from “free”, “organic” and “natural” listings on search engine results.  All major search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, Bing) show such results when you search for a word or an item.
   
   These keywords are embedded in a webpage like this in HTML:
   <meta name=”keywords” content=”Domain, Hosting, Servers, Nigeria, GigaLayer”>
   
   Even if you have keywords in place, you should submit to various search engines and directories. In addition, it is worth submitting to lesser known directories. If your website is listed in as many places as possible, it can boost your ranking on major search engines as well.
   
   Another thing is page-rank. But as a starter, you should pay no heed to page rankings until you have established a solid base for your website through practised consistency and content. Focus on regularity and content then when you get your desired traffic, Alexa and Google page rank will follow.
   
   
4. Be Social:
   Constantly update your Tweets, Facebook status and any social media site you are on, every time you make an update on you website. So, if you have a blog update, link it, video reference, link it, product launch… just link it! 
   
   Finish your posts with open ended questions and an invitation to comment. Create a Facebook fan page. Examples of such are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube  
   
   
5. Build Community:
   An open forum discussion, a blog, basically a platform for interaction, post in forums, visit online discussion forums where people in your target market like to gather. Post useful responses to questions and include a link to your website at the end of your post, next to your name. Again, do not overdo it!
   
   
6. Stay Lean:
   Nice presentation of blog design and faster loading are also key factors that will assure the number of loyal visitors to your web page. 
   
   Unattractive look and difficult navigation is a major turn off as visitors will be discouraged from revisiting. A simple and easily navigate-able design is more appropriate. Page load checker is a very good tool for page load information.
   
   
7. Finally, Be Welcoming:
   Use welcoming colours for your website, use info-graphics for your posts as more people relate better to images than words.
   
   Our friends at http did a great report on Colors, you may want to learn more on that titled Why Facebook is Blue!

If you found these tips helpful, feel free to share and comment in the comment box. Also, if you have tips that worked for you, we’ll love to hear from you.

—
Uju Umerah
Co-Founder @ GigaLayer

Located in Forest City, NC, USA; Facebook operates one of the best and most sophisticated DataCenters in the world. This has caught our eyes at GigaLayer, matching our big dream for Africa on such a facility.

Facebook has over 1 billion users sharing billions of likes, pokes, photos, videos, events, etc every single day. One cannot, but imagine the amount of data this company stores, the number of servers networked, the security, the power consumption, the heat-control, the staff, everything!

Last month, Facebook announced that they’re building another DataCenter in Iowa to handle their growing number of activities.

“For most people, Facebook is something pretty simple. It’s a service you visit every day to connect with the people and things you care about. But behind the scenes, Facebook is a global service of immense scale and complexity — over 1 billion people use Facebook every month, and every day there are more than 2.7 billion Likes and over 2.4 billion content items shared with friends.”

If you are someone like me, you may be hearing of Iowa for the first time.   Well it is a state in USA well known for landmass of agriculture and fresh wind. This means Facebook went to get enough space and better cooling systems which I find to be an amazing move in that case.

Another thing that really caught our interest is that Facebook has built an open, interactive App that shows their server usage reports such as power usage, water usage, humidity and temperate.

We love what Facebook is doing, we are looking to grow our business to such level of standards. It is a big dream we believe we will achieve!

At GigaLayer we provide reliable Shared Hosting and Dedicated Server solutions in Nigeria in particular and Africa at large.

—
Ahmad Mukoshy
CTO/Founder @ GigaLayer

Buen día!

We are glad to announce our International Payment option to you. Nigerians living in Diaspora and foreign clients interested in buying domain names and hosting with us can now do so seamlessly!

This was unveiled on Thursdays  9th April 2013 during Mobile-Web West Africa event at Fourpoint Hotels in Lagos, Lekki in a crowd of participants from around Africa and the rest of the world. 

Following the release of Nigeria’s TLD (.ng), we saw a growing interest by foreign clients in buying domain names like hiki.ng, cooki.ng, etc which we responded to in a timely fashion.

• The juice is that we now accept payments with foreign MasterCard, Visa, AmericanExpress, Discover and PayPal from all over the world.
  
• This is available STRICTLY to clients outside Nigeria.

If you have a specific question about the new payment option, feel to contact us (sales@gigalayer.com) OR call +234.8025594018

You can choose Int’l Card option during your order to use this new gateway. We thank you for doing business with us. Happy Hosting!

Last month, we battled hard to assist SBO Host restore lots of client web sites that suffered from WordPress hijacking, which started slowly and grew in momentum, hurting lots of SBOHost Clients. Well, it has been solved now and everything seems to have subsided there.

Then, just today again I saw ResellerClub, an Indian domain and hosting company publish on their blog how the WordPress hack is now the topic of web-hosts around the word and more websites are beeing compromised, even US Financial Institutions have reported cases.

So, I thought it is very crucial t to share some basic guide on how you can keep your WordPress protected, on GigaLayer or anywhere else.

Usually webs sites driven by content management systems (CMS) like Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, etc are the most commonly targeted web sites. But if you follow the instructions below, you reduce your chances of being hacked by over 90%.

1. Always update your installation and all plugins.
2. Remove any unused plugin or extension
3. Change your directory permissions to 755 and files to 644
4. Use a secure password for your cPanel and admin area, this should help: http://pctools.com/guides/password/
   
   In the case of WordPress, you can proceed with these:
   
   
5. Install the WP Better Security Plugin 
6. Disable DROP command for the DB_USER .
   (You can do this from your PhpMyAdmin)
7. Move the “wp-config.php” one directory level up, and change its permission to 400.
8. Change the permissions of your .htaccess file to 400
9. Restrict access to wp-admin only to your network/system IP.
10. Read more on WordPress Hardening.

Once you are able to do these steps, you should be safe. If you need any assistance, jump to your Billing account and chat with our live assistance or open a support ticket and we will be glad to assist.

Was this helpful?

We have been more-than happy serving Nigerians, providing hosting to hundreds of websites on shared server, virtual private servers and even dedicated servers. It only started back in 2007 and the journey gets exciting every single day.

We have had the best customer support around the market, client responses have been overwhelming, we get a lot of responses like these:

@gigalayer you guys are the best trust me!

February 28, 2013

Thank you @gigalayer !!!

November 16, 2012

Customer Support from @gigalayer is AMAZING!!! I highly recommend them for your website hosting needs. (✌ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞

October 23, 2012

So far no other hosting company has impressed me lyk @gigalayer .. Gud job.

September 3, 2012

Folks, you can’t beat @gigalayer webhosting on support. Wow, that was quick.

August 28, 2012

With all these overwhelming responses and an amazing business that’s 6yrs old, it was not easy finding a better way to give back to the people that made us who we are today!

So we introduced this special offer:

1yr Free Hosting for All, every Monday of April 2013.

Yes, that’s correct. When you come to our site very Monday you’d get this offer right in front of you. Signup, enter the domain you want and your new free website will be up in minutes.

[UPDATE: This was an April fool link and is only now an archive.]
This free offer starts today, Monday 1st April. Click Here to get your free domain and hosting account for 1 year, 100% Free.

Thank you for choosing GigaLayer and we look forward to serve you even better.

Let us know what you think, comment bellow.

Doing business online means having customers from virtually anywhere in the world. Once you have your websites or shopping cart ready, the next thing is payment processing. But this has been a very critical problem in Nigeria as Paypal and many more payment processors out there are yet to be available to Nigerians merchants.

Most websites in Nigeria fall back to Bank Deposit as the only form of payment for their online products. In this post, I want to share with you the few available payment processors you can use on your website to receive card payments in Nigeria.

1) Interswitch is the No1 card company in Nigeria and a partner of MasterCard. They built their own gateway which they lease to clients for N150,000 one time fee and 1.5% commission on every payment. The gateway can charge MasterCards, Verve and the regular Nigerian Interswitch cards.

2) Etranzact is the second major card company in Nigeria, they also have their own payment gateway which you can lease for a one time fee of N120,000 and unconfirmed 1.3% commission. With this gateway you can receive online payments from Etransact cards and their mobile money subsidiary PocketMoni.

3) UnifiedPayments (formerly ValueCard) is the current major partner of Visa Inc. They currently allow charging of Visa Cards in Nigeria through their gateway available to their registered merchants.

4) GTPay is owned by GTBank. The bank built this gateway to let its customers receive payments through Interswitch’s and Etranzact’s gateway for a setup fee of N75,000. 

5) CashEnvoy is a privately owned gateway integrated with Interswitch and Entranzact. They allow their registered merchants to receive payment via their gateway. They have an awesome API to allow you seamless integration on your website.

6) VoguePay is a privately owned gateway with lots of features like user wallets and recurrent billing. They are subscribed to Interswitch, Etrazact and UnifiedPayments; bringing together all the possibilities of accepting payments in Nigeria. They offer free registration, N1,000 verification charge and 1% charge per transaction + 1% per settlement fee.

7) Eyowo is yet another payment process registered with Interswitch and Etranzact for now. They have a very friendly interface for both merchants and the payers. They charge N6,000 setup fee and 1% transaction fee.

8) GlobalPay is built by Zenith Bank just like the GTPay, it allows the bank customers to receive card payments on their website. GlobalPay is regsitered with Interswitch, UnifiedPayments and Etransact!

9) SimplePay last but not the least is another yet privately owned payment gateway for developers. With SimplePay, you can payments through Interswitch, UniverfiedPayments and Entransact.

NOTE:  
It is always better to receive from the 3 major card processors (Interswitch, UnifiedPayments and Etranzact). The other gateways are all subscribers of these processors making it pocket friendly to accept payments.

Let us know if this was helpful to you by commenting. Do you use any of these gateways? How was your experience? 

Whether you are a web developer or designer, there are times when you struggle to get inspiration or concepts on building websites. Often it becomes crucial to seek this inspiration from other creative guys.

So I thought I should share 20 of the best places you can get real inspiration to energize the creative developer in you on your next website project.

This list is in specific order:

[1]: http://siteinspire.com

Site Inspire is a community driven site where web designers showcase amazing creativity and web site layouts. You will find a lot of creativity and great layouts here. 
 

[2]: http://cssmania.com

CSS Mania is a has a gallery of awesome web sites developed using XHTML/html5 & CSS, the CSS Mania project was started by @gabilondo. (Gabriel Segura). 
 

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