Best WordPress hosting for beginners: hosting and domain names explained

To put a WordPress website online you need two things – a domain name and hosting. Your domain name is your address, like kimscotland.com. Your hosting is where your website’s files actually live. For most beginners I’d buy both from the same managed hosting company, because it means one bill, one login and one team to ask when something goes wrong. The host I recommend is Lyrical Host. Budget roughly £10 to £15 a year for your domain, and from around £10 a month for good managed hosting.

This guide is for small business owners setting up their first self-hosted WordPress website. Prices are in pounds, from August 2026. I’ll cover what each thing actually is, what to look for, what it costs, and how to connect the two together.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

What’s the difference between a domain name and hosting?

This trips up almost everyone at the start, so let’s clear it up before we go any further.

Think of a shop on the high street. Your domain name is the address people use to find you. Your hosting is the actual building where all your stock is kept. You need both, and they do completely different jobs.

You can buy them from two different companies, or from one. I’ll come back to which I’d recommend shortly.

Domain names

What is a domain name?

Every device connected to the internet is given a unique address called an IP address. It’s a string of numbers and dots, and it isn’t remotely memorable.

Somebody very sensibly came up with domain names: a friendly, readable address pointing that string of numbers behind the scenes. Instead of typing a long list of digits, you type kimscotland.com and end up in the right place.

What is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It’s the system that translates your domain name into the numerical address of the server holding your files. A domain name server is one of the computers doing that translating.

You don’t need to understand how any of it works to run a website. You just need to know it exists, because you’ll come across the phrase “name servers” when you connect your domain to your hosting.

How to choose a domain name

Usually, your business name is the obvious choice, followed by .com, .co.uk, .net and so on.
I’d buy the .com if it’s available, simply because it’s what people type when they’re guessing. If someone half remembers your business, they’ll try
yourbusinessname.com first. If the .com has already gone, .co.uk is a perfectly good option for a UK business.

A few things worth thinking about:

• keep it short and easy to say out loud
• avoid hyphens and unusual spellings, or you’ll spend the rest of your life
• spelling it out on the phone
• check it doesn’t read as something unfortunate when the words run together

Where to buy a domain name

Buy from a domain registrar. These are companies that sell domain names and little else. Namecheap, IONOS, 123 Reg and GoDaddy are all well-known ones.

Or buy it from your hosting company at the same time as your hosting. Most hosts sell domain names, including Lyrical Host.

How much does a domain name cost?

Domain names are paid for every year.

In the UK, expect to pay somewhere around £10 to £15 a year for a standard .com or .co.uk (source: Hostinger).

Do be careful of the very cheap headline prices. Plenty of registrars advertise a domain for pennies for the first year, then the renewal price is several times higher; one popular UK registrar advertises a .com for a penny and renews it at over £22 (source: 365i). Always look at the renewal price, not the first-year price.

Should you buy your domain separately or with your hosting?

My recommendation: buy it with your hosting.

Buying separately can sometimes save you a pound or two. But when you’re starting out, having everything in one place is worth far more than the small saving. One company, one bill, one login, one support team. And when it comes to connecting your domain to your hosting, it’s usually done for you automatically.

If you’d rather keep them separate, there’s nothing wrong with that at all; I’ve done both over the years. Just put the renewal dates in your diary so nothing lapses by accident.

Hosting

What is web hosting?

Web hosting is where your website’s files are stored. Your host keeps them on a computer called a server and serves them up whenever somebody types your address into their browser.

A good host does three jobs: it keeps your files safe from hackers, it keeps your site online with as little downtime as possible, and it serves your pages quickly. That last one matters more than most people realise, because hosting is one of the biggest factors in how fast your website loads.

Your hosting options

There are several kinds of hosting, but for a small business website it really comes down to two: shared and managed.

Shared hosting

Shared hosting is where your files sit on a server alongside lots of other websites, all sharing the same resources. It’s the cheapest option, because the hosting company can fit many customers onto one machine.

Pros of shared hosting

• Affordable. It’s the cheapest way to get your website online.
• Usually includes personalised email addresses on your own domain, like kim@kimscotland.com.

Cons of shared hosting

• You’ll usually need to install WordPress updates yourself.
• Slower loading times, because the server isn’t set up specifically for WordPress.
• Support can be hit and miss. Some teams are lovely; some leave you to it.
• A busy website sharing your server can slow yours down.

Managed hosting

Managed hosting is where the hosting company looks after the technical side for you: updates, backups, security scanning, speed optimisation, and a support team who actually know WordPress. All the fiddly, boring bits are taken care of while you get on with your zone of genius.

Pros of managed hosting

• Speed. The infrastructure is set up and optimised for WordPress.
• Security is taken care of for you.
• WordPress core updates are handled automatically.
• Support teams often have real developers on them.
• Regular backups, with easy access if you need to roll your site back.
• Personalised email addresses on your own domain.

Cons of managed hosting

• It costs more than shared hosting.
• Some plugins may be restricted, usually to keep sites fast and secure.

How much does hosting cost?

Prices vary a lot between companies. As a guide to the UK market, the average starter shared hosting plan works out at around £2.70 a month, rising to about £7.32 on renewal. Managed WordPress hosting averages around £9.20 a month to begin with, rising to about £18.32 on renewal (source: Diggity Marketing).

Notice the pattern? The renewal price is often two or three times the advertised price. This is completely standard across the hosting industry, and it catches a lot of people out. Always check what you’ll be paying in year two before you sign up.

Which should a beginner choose?

Managed hosting, if you can stretch to it.

That’s the more expensive answer, but I don’t say that lightly. The real difference shows up when something goes wrong. On shared hosting, a broken website is your problem to solve. On managed hosting, there’s a team whose job it is to fix it.

If the budget genuinely isn’t there yet, shared hosting is a perfectly good place to start and far better than having no website at all. Buy the best you can afford and know that you can always move later. Switching hosts is much less painful than people imagine, and most good hosts will migrate your site for you free of charge.

What makes a good web host?

Whatever your budget, these are the things I look for.

• Great support. Friendly, responsive and available when you need them, ideally with developers on the team.
• Minimal downtime. Reliable servers and a team looking after them, so your site stays online.
• Modern hardware and systems. SSD drives, strong security, and data centres around the world so your pages load quickly wherever your visitors are.
• Transparent pricing. No sneaky upsells, and no renewal price that triples in year two.
• Daily backups included. As standard, not as a paid extra.
• A free SSL certificate. That’s the padlock in the browser bar. You shouldn’t have to pay for it.
• A staging area. A private copy of your site where you can test changes before they go live.

If a host ticks those boxes, you’ll be in good hands.

Why I recommend Lyrical Host

Lyrical Host is a UK hosting company based in Nottingham, founded in 2017 by Jenni Brown and Joseph Tansley (source: Lyrical Host). I host both my own and my husband’s websites with them and recommend them to my clients.

They were set up deliberately to be different from the rest of the industry: no hidden costs, no jargon, and no assumption that you already know what a name server is. That matters to me, because I work with small business owners who are often nervous about the tech side of things.

Here’s what makes them worth it.

• Everything is included. The price you sign up at covers your security certificate, email addresses on your domain, daily backups, automatic WordPress updates and one to one developer-grade support. No upsells waiting for you at the checkout.
• The price doesn’t jump on renewal. What you pay at sign up is what you carry on paying (source: Lyrical Host). Given everything I just said about renewal prices, this is a genuinely big deal.
• Developer-led support. When something breaks, the last thing you want is to be told to “find a developer”. Lyrical’s support team is made up of developers, so they fix the problem rather than passing you along. This is the single biggest reason I recommend them to beginners.
• A beginner friendly dashboard. Clean, modern and clearly labelled. You can manage plugins, themes and users without even logging into WordPress. Setting up an SSL certificate is one of the simplest processes I’ve ever seen.
• Staging on every plan. Test a theme update or a full redesign on a private copy of your site, with no risk to the live version.
• Daily backups. Taken automatically every day, with the option to roll back to any version from the past 30 days.
• Free resources every month. Exclusive stock images and resources for your content. I’ve not seen another host offer this.
• They plant five trees on the anniversary of your subscription, which helps offset your website’s carbon footprint and supports farmers in developing countries too.

I’ll be straight with you: I hold affiliate links for more than one hosting company, and Lyrical Host isn’t the one that pays me the most. I recommend them anyway, because I know they give my clients better value for money.

Lyrical Host Discount Code

Use the code KIMSCOTLAND10 to get 10% off your first payment with Lyrical Host. This can be used if you want to pay monthly, 6 monthly, annually or bi-annually.

How to connect your domain name to your hosting

If you bought your domain and your hosting from the same company, this is usually done for you, and you can happily skip this section.
If you bought them separately, here’s how to join them up. What you’re doing is copying your name servers from your host across to your registrar.

1. Log in to your hosting account and find your name servers. They’re usually in the control panel under a heading like DNS, name servers or domain settings. They’ll look something like ns1.yourhost.com and ns2.yourhost.com.
2. Copy them down exactly, including any numbers.
3. Log in to your domain registrar, which is the company you bought your domain name from.
4. Find the name server settings for your domain. These are often under something like “manage domain” or “DNS settings”.
5. Replace the existing name servers with the ones from your host and save.
6. Wait. Changes can take up to 24 hours to work their way around the internet, though it’s often much quicker than that.

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