Choosing a provider is easier once you separate three services: domain registration, DNS and website hosting. Registration gives you the right to use a domain for the registration period. DNS directs requests to the relevant services. Hosting runs or serves your website. Email may be another service again.
One company can supply all of them, or you can use different providers. The useful question is which arrangement gives you the features, support and control your website needs at a cost you can maintain.
Start with a short requirements sheet
Write down the type of site, the software it will use, expected content and any essential functions. A small portfolio, a WordPress publication and a shop with live payments have different support needs. Do not choose a server merely because it has the largest storage number in an advert.
For WordPress, check the official hosting requirements against the actual plan. WordPress currently recommends PHP 8.3 or greater, MariaDB 10.11 or greater or MySQL 8.0 or greater, and HTTPS support. Ask who maintains the server software and whether the versions you need remain supported.
Record whether you need staging, automated backups, scheduled tasks, email hosting or more than one website. If you already own an expired domain, treat its history and suitability as a separate purchase question; a hosting account does not resolve those issues.
Understand what each hosting type asks of you
| Type | Practical use | Main question |
|---|---|---|
| Shared hosting | A modest site with straightforward needs. | What resource limits apply, and what happens when you reach them? |
| Managed application hosting | A site where the provider handles defined maintenance tasks. | Exactly which updates, backups and recovery work are included? |
| VPS | A project needing more configuration control. | Who administers and secures the operating system? |
| Dedicated server | A workload that can justify a whole physical server. | Can your team manage it, and is the extra cost necessary? |
| Cloud service | A workload needing particular deployment or scaling features. | How are usage, availability and administration charged? |
These labels do not establish speed or reliability. Managed has no universal package definition, and cloud does not automatically mean that your application survives a failure. Read the plan’s responsibilities and limits rather than assuming the label includes them.
Check recovery and support before attractive extras
A backup is useful only if you can restore the right data. Check frequency, retention, whether the database and uploaded files are included, and whether restoration costs extra. Keep an independent copy where practical and establish how you would recover if the hosting account became inaccessible.
WordPress’s backup guidance explains the distinction between site files and database backups. For a shop or frequently edited site, decide how much recent work you could afford to lose. Daily backups may be insufficient if orders or records change throughout the day.
Compare support hours, channels and scope. An always-open help desk may handle server faults but exclude plugin debugging. Ask how an outage is escalated, what migration assistance covers and whether there is a public service-status history. An uptime guarantee also needs its exclusions and credit terms read carefully.
Compare the full bill and the exit route
Check the initial term and renewal term separately. Include domain renewal, email, backups, security services, migration charges and tax where applicable. Decide whether you can export your files and database, and whether the site depends on a proprietary builder you cannot readily move.
A hypothetical plan advertised at £4 per month for twelve months costs £48 for that year. If it then renews at £10 per month, the next year costs £120. Adding a £20 domain renewal and £36 email service makes that second-year total £176. These figures illustrate the calculation and are not current provider prices.
Use the domain registration cost guide to track the domain separately. When a bundle includes a domain, confirm who is named as registrant, how you manage it and how you can transfer it. ICANN’s transfer FAQs explain relevant registrar-transfer conditions for covered domains.
Protect the domain when setting up hosting
Keep your registrar account secured, with recovery details you can access independently of the new website. Before changing nameservers or DNS records, save the existing configuration. Identify the records serving email so a website change does not accidentally interrupt it.
Compare two or three plans against the same requirements sheet. Choose the one whose responsibilities, recovery process and ongoing price you understand. Our start-here guide can help place domain selection and setup within the wider project. Once hosting is active, test the real site and its backups before relying on it.