If you have decided to build a business site, the domain and the hosting are the first two things you meet. Both are awkward to change later, and hosting in particular quietly decides the range of what you will be able to do. Thirty minutes now can save you an entire migration a year from now.
The domain — short, and sayable out loud
A domain is your brand’s address. It does not need to be clever; it needs to survive being read over the phone. Names with several hyphens, or with characters that blur together (0 and o), or where the spelling does not follow the pronunciation, fail every time a customer types them by hand.
For the extension, .com is the safest default. Newer novelty extensions are cheap but tend to attract more spam filtering on outbound mail — if enquiry email matters to your business, be conservative here.
Register it under your own account. A domain registered under an agency’s account takes time to recover when the relationship ends. The same rule applies to hosting, repositories and payment accounts.
Hosting — where the paths diverge
Hosting splits into shared hosting and server hosting (a VPS or cloud instance). Shared hosting is far cheaper per month, but the two are selling different things. Shared hosting sells you “a WordPress that runs”. Server hosting sells you “a machine you can configure”.
Shared hosting is often enough at the start. With few visitors and simple pages, the difference is hard to feel. The problem arrives the moment you do feel it. Improving speed requires a caching layer, and a caching layer requires server-level permissions. That is when you end up migrating — and migrating is harder the bigger the site has grown.
Decide now, or decide later
You do not have to get everything right up front. Just be deliberate about the choices that are expensive to reverse.
The short version: if you plan to build search traffic and take enquiries within the next year, choose server hosting. If the site will sit there like a business card, shared hosting is the sensible call. If you genuinely cannot tell, start on shared hosting but set things up assuming you will move — the install settings in the next part double as that preparation.
The wider cost picture lives in the Servers & infrastructure archive, and if you would rather hand the move and the optimisation over as one job, see the optimization program.
Next part
With hosting settled, it is time to install WordPress. The next part covers the seven settings you must change immediately after installation — miss one of them and your site never appears in search at all.