Domain registration and hosting are the bits of the web stack everyone forgets about until something breaks — until renewal week, until the SSL expires, until a DNS change is needed urgently and the only person with the password is on holiday. Get the setup right once and most of the hassle disappears.
.ie domains — eligibility and registrars
.ie eligibility rules were liberalised in March 2018: the previous "connection to Ireland" requirement was dropped. Today, anyone with an Irish or EU postal address can register a .ie domain. The IEDR (Internet Engineering Development Registry) is the registry; you don't register with them directly — you register through an accredited registrar.
Sensible registrars for Irish small businesses (rough scope as of editorial publication — verify current scope and pricing directly):
- Blacknight (blacknight.com) — Carlow-based, large and well-supported. The default for many Irish businesses.
- Register365 — long-established Irish registrar.
- WebWorld (webworld.ie) — Irish-based, strong cPanel hosting alongside domain services.
- Namecheap, Gandi — international; cheaper for some TLDs; not always the cleanest experience for .ie specifically.
Cost: €15–€30/year for a .ie. Don't pay €60+/year unless the registrar is bundling something useful.
The cardinal rule
Your domain must be registered to you (or your business), not to your web designer or developer. Always. Always-always. Most "I can't move my site, my developer disappeared" stories trace back to a domain registered to the agency. Keep your registrar account in your own name, with your own email, your own credit card on file.
Hosting choices
- Shared cPanel hosting — €4–€15/month from Blacknight, WebWorld, Hostinger, SiteGround. Suits 90% of Irish small-business sites. WordPress works well here.
- Managed WordPress hosting — €25–€80/month from Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround's GoGeek tier. Faster, more secure, better support; worth it if WordPress is your business's lifeblood.
- Static / Jamstack hosting — Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages. Free tier covers most small sites; €19+/month for higher tiers. Excellent for headless and statically-generated sites.
- Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace — bundled hosting. You don't pick a host; the platform is the host.
- VPS / cloud servers — DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS Lightsail. €5–€40/month; only if you have someone who can administer Linux. Not for non-technical owners.
The infrastructure baseline every site needs
- HTTPS with auto-renewing SSL. Let's Encrypt is free and works fine; cPanel provides this automatically on most modern hosts.
- Daily off-site backups. Tested. Keep at least 30 days. The free plugin doesn't count if it stores backups on the same server.
- 99.9%+ uptime monitoring. Free with UptimeRobot or Better Uptime. Get an alert when the site goes down.
- DNS hosted somewhere reliable. Cloudflare's free DNS is faster than most registrar default DNS; worth the 15-minute setup.
- Email separate from web hosting — use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for business email. Mixing email and web hosting on cheap shared hosting causes deliverability problems.
What's worth paying extra for
- A staging environment. A copy of your live site you can edit safely. Available on most managed WordPress hosts and on cPanel hosts that support it.
- Manual support contact. Cheap hosts have ticket systems with 24-hour replies. Slightly more expensive hosts have phone or chat support that solves problems in minutes when they matter.
- Geographic location for performance. An Irish-hosted site loads faster for Irish users. Marginal but real. Cloudflare CDN evens this out for international traffic.