Domains and hosting are the corner stone of your website. You need to know what you are purchasing and what your future plans are, in terms of where you see your businesses market in 5 years time.

• Purchase a domain a .ie of you are doing business in Ireland and .com or .eu if you are doing business internationally. You may want to purchase .net .org and other extensions so as to protect your brand. Registrars will always want to cross sell other extensions, I would advise be realistic. No point in purchasing a .cn domain if you are a local service provider.
• Keep your domain purchase details in a safe place.
• Renewals are automatic run off your credit card, if your card is cancelled or stolen remember to register a new card with the registrars for the next renewal
• Have your domain renewal notice go to your personal free mail account. Once your domain expires it will potentially disable email, you need another separate email account to accept reminders and notifications etc.
• Don't purchase domain renewal for 10 years, in 10 years you will completely forget to renew and not be able to find the renewal details and risk loosing the domain.

• Purchase hosting: we would recommend linux hosting from a major player, make sure they are not reselling and of they are that they are on good terms with the reseller and that you know who the end game hoster is.
• if you are looking for a good google ranking for Ireland make sure the hosting is physically located in Ireland. If your business is in the the US the consider US based hosting from one of the big top hosters.
• hosting providers make boasts about uptime. Make sure this is backed up by stats you can see on the web. Acceptable down time a year should be as low as 2 hours.
• Make sure your hoster has a backup and a recover plan in place if they suffer a data loss. Alot of hosters leave it to the site owners and will expect them to back their own site up.
• Ask you hoster what their DNS failover plan is. This is the most common downtime issue, a DNS server holds the map to all websites in a hoster and if this machine is not backed up or mirrored then there is a risk of serious down time. Large hosting companies will have a plan.
• Always have a personal backup of your websites files and databases.
• Some hosters may look after your domains too, remember they are usually acting as an agent and not the actual registrar.