₦airaland Forum

If your target audiences in Nigeria, then there will be a chance to get higher ranking easily using local hosting and local domain TLD.

I think you should choose a local hosting provider, but you should also consider the customer reviews about them.

As per personal experience, I would like to recommend https://www.name.com/ for best services and zero downtime.

What was the experience that impacted you the most in your life?

As you explain you just start your own classified ad site, users need to register and/or login into your website. Therefore, users need to fill up their personal information like email address, password, birth date and any other.
So, it is your responsibility to protect their information and provide assurance that they are at safe place. SSL will do it for you and establish authenticity to your website as well protect all information which is transmitting between the browser and the server.

Google also recommend HTTPS everywhere and announced HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014.

There are many certificate providers are offering free SSL certificates as below.

Let’s Encrypt – https://letsencrypt.org/
WoSign - https://www.wosign.com/english/
StartSSL - https://www.startssl.com/
SSL2BUY (Comodo Positive SSL) - https://www.ssl2buy.com/wiki/free-ssl-certificate-for-one-year-at-ssl2buy/

SSL can protect your site against cyber attacks like man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks.