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Tell us about yourself, when were you born and where are you based?
I am Oluniyi David Ajao, a website developer and Managing Director at Web4Africa Limited (www.web4africa.net) I blog at www.davidajao.com/blog/

What is your business all about and what inspired it?
Web4Africa offers affordable domain name registration, professional website development and reliable web hosting to clients worldwide. Web4Africa was inspired by the need to offer affordable web services to residents of Africa.

What were you doing before launching your business and when was it launched?
Web4Africa was launched in 2002. It was my first venture into business and it has been run with relative success since then.

How much was invested in launching your business and how was that capital financed?
The business started with $0, practically. I continuously re-invested the profit and was able to build something out of nothing, overtime.

What planning did you engage before launching?
I had to decide on what services to offer and how best to offer them at affordable rates. There was little planning to do since there was no capital to start with.

Are there any major challenges that you had to overcome in launching your business?
Several, running a world-class web service from an African country is very challenging. Starting a business with $0 doesn’t get more challenging. I had to improvise a lot at that time. Buying my first desktop PC was from money I received before designing the biggest website I ever developed at that time.

You’ve your servers hosted in the US, why not Ghana?
Ghana does not have sufficient infrastructure to support world-class web hosting services at competitive prices. We hope this can become feasible in the near future so we can at least offer local hosting to residents of Ghana since that would make more technical sense.

Are your clients mainly in West Africa or throughout Africa?
A good percentage are in West Africa but our thousands of clients are spread across every continent of the world.

You also handle domain name registration, how many domains do you own?
Web4Africa has registered more than 8,000 domains in the past 7 years.

What are your short and long-term business plans?
We are working hard to improve on our services in short term and intend to be recognized as the best in Africa, long-term.

Is your business affected by the current economic climate?
Since our clients are spread across the world, our business is mildly affected since some clients are in countries that are heavily affected by the economic downturn.

In your opinion what untapped business opportunities still exists online in West Africa?
No single online business opportunities in West Africa have been fully tapped. You have to understand that the use of the Internet is still spreading in West Africa. It is far from the point of saturation therefore any good business venture that is well managed should thrive despite the harsh environment (poor infrastructure) in most West African countries.

What have been your business highlight(s) since launching?
Web4Africa is presently is largest web host in West Africa and moving to greater heights.

Do you have corporate clients in your books?
Hundreds.

Is your client support division a 24 hour operation?
Very close to 24hours but equally effective. We aim to offer a 24 hours operations soon but our clients can always use our FAQ and knowledgebase, and can always open a ticket at any time of everyday.