Trading Names
Ecommerce hosting for first stores — A first shop: the name, the records, and the checkout that depends on both
A shop cannot take a card until the name resolves and the certificate has issued against it, which makes DNS the first thing you set up and the last thing you touch.
The short answer
Register the name you will still want when the catalogue has a thousand lines, get the apex and www both resolving here so the certificate issues cleanly, then put the shop on hosting set up for retail: WooCommerce on Sprint Store gets a catalogue trading properly, and every upgrade should follow product count and order volume rather than the calendar.
The working sits below: choosing the ending, the records the till depends on, and the dates in the trading year you must not miss.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
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Hosting renewals
Every first shop has a launch-week list, and DNS is usually the item nobody wrote down. The theme is ready, the products are loaded, the payment gateway is connected — and the padlock warning on the bare domain is the reason the first three visitors leave.
So this page starts with the name and works forward to the till. Very few first shops are brought down by traffic they could not serve; a good many are held up for a fortnight by a record that was never created.
Pick the name for the till, not the logo
Say it out loud to somebody who has not seen it written. If they have to ask how it is spelled, you will be answering that question for years, on the telephone, in every order that goes astray.
On endings: a .com still reads as a shop to the widest audience, and every registry sets its own rules and its own renewal rate, so check what year two costs before you fall in love with a novelty ending. Retail endings such as .store or .shop describe what you do at a glance and are perfectly respectable; just price the renewal first.
If the trade name is already a brand, register the obvious plural and the misspelling people actually make, and redirect them to the shop. That is defensive housekeeping rather than marketing, and it is far cheaper before somebody else does it.
What must resolve before you can take a card
Both hostnames need an answer: the apex, yourshop.com, and www.yourshop.com. Pick one as canonical, serve the other as a permanent redirect to it, and never leave them serving two separate copies of the shop.
The certificate is the part people meet as a problem. It issues once the name resolves here, and it covers what has been pointed at us — which is why a shop with www set up and the apex still pointing at an old host shows a padlock warning on exactly half its links.
Payment gateways add their own requirement: the return and callback URLs you register with them must match the canonical hostname exactly. A gateway configured for www against a shop that redirects to the apex produces the sort of intermittent checkout failure that takes a week to diagnose.
The dates in a trading year you must not miss
A shop's registration expiring is not the same class of problem as a website going down. Card payments stop, order confirmations bounce, and the recovery is not in your hands.
The sequence after expiry is roughly thirty days of grace, then redemption at a steep fee, then auction. In the middle of a trading season, the grace period alone can cost more than the year's hosting.
So: auto-renew on, the card behind it checked for expiry every autumn, renewal notices going to a mailbox somebody reads, and no delegation changes at all in the weeks you expect to be busiest. Freeze the zone before the season, not during it.
Where we would put a first catalogue
The Sprint Store plan: WooCommerce on hosting set up for retail, with SSL, the migration and mail already inside, on a hosting renewal charged at the order rate, and an upgrade path so this decision never has to be made twice.
WooCommerce keeps checkout out of the page cache deliberately, since every basket is different, which is why upgrades should follow order volume rather than product count. Turbo Store and Nitro Store sit above for the season the orders climb.
Order annually and the first year of the name's registration is included, in your own details, renewing afterwards at ordinary list price.
Check the provider you are about to trust with your address. Ask who the registrant will be, what the renewal is, and whether the name is released on request once the registry's sixty-day lock lifts. Ask the same about the hosting renewal figure, and read the refund terms for carve-outs.
Ours: Hosting & Domains is a trading name of Azaanex Inc., federally incorporated in Canada. Shared, business, WordPress and WooCommerce hosting carry thirty days; domain registrations sit outside that, because the registry charges the instant the name is secured.
Then let two working weeks of real trading decide, which the migration request and the refund window between them make close to free.
The name is the part of a shop you cannot rebuild
Themes, plugins and even the platform can be replaced. The address customers typed last Christmas cannot. We would rather you held it in your own details and pointed it wherever you like.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit under every tier, the smallest plan included — that is the floor here, not an upgrade.
- Apex and www both resolving, one canonical
- Certificate issued as soon as the name points here
- Auto-renew on, renewal notices to a real mailbox
- The registration in your own details
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
One canonical hostname
Apex and www both answered, one redirecting to the other, so the certificate and the gateway agree with each other.
Certificates that follow the name
Free SSL issues as soon as the name resolves here and reissues before it lapses — never a launch-week task.
The answer above, as a plan
The Sprint Store plan is this page's conclusion in product form — one rate, essentials inside, upgradeable in place.
Year one of the name included
Annual plans carry the first year's registration in your own details, renewing afterwards at ordinary list price.
A named company, not a brand
Azaanex Inc., federally incorporated in Canada — a filing you can read before you trade through anybody's platform.
Headroom above where you start
Turbo Store and Nitro Store are a plan change on the account, not a migration, for the season the orders climb.
Prices Side by Side
How our prices sit against the majors
What the market typically charges to join and to renew, set beside ours, including the renewal figure most comparison charts leave out.
| Feature | Hosting & DomainsMost popular | Typical household-name host | Typical bargain host | Typical loss-leader deal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Renewal price / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Entry-level plan renews at the price you signed up at | ||||
| SSL as standard | ||||
| Migration done for you | ||||
| NVMe drives on the entry-level tier | ||||
| Backups run every day from the first tier up | ||||
| Real humans on support, 24/7 |
*Our own column shows the lowest-priced annual plan on our books, pulled live from the same catalogue that feeds the pricing page, which is why it cannot go stale. Beside it sit three columns holding the ranges that hosts in each bracket tend to advertise: introductory rates that normally ask for one to four years up front, then climb once the term runs out. Naming rivals and printing their figures is something we gave up, since a price nobody can verify on the day you happen to read this has no business on the page. Measure us against the host you are actually weighing up, and give the renewal row the hardest look of the lot.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Settle the name and the ending
Spell it down a telephone, check the registry's renewal rate for the ending, and register the obvious plural and misspelling while they are cheap.
- 2
Get both hostnames resolving, then check the padlock
Apex and www, one canonical and one redirect, certificate issued, gateway URLs matching. Test a real order before you tell anybody the shop is open.
- 3
Lock the calendar before the season
Auto-renew on, card in date, notices to a mailbox somebody reads — and no delegation changes in your busiest weeks.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- The name's first year included when you order annually
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old one lapses
- Full zone editing in the panel for apex, www and every subdomain
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- NVMe SSD storage on every tier, not only the dear ones
- LiteSpeed caching in the server itself rather than bolted on by plugin
- Staging copies for trying a change before it goes live
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
Should a first shop be on .com, .store or .shop?
Any of them works. Judge on three things: how easily it is spelled aloud, what the registry charges to renew it in year two, and whether the ending carries entry requirements. Retail endings read clearly and are widely accepted; the argument for .com is simply that it is what people type when they are guessing.
Why does the padlock warning appear on the bare domain but not on www?
Because only one of the two hostnames is pointing here. A certificate covers what has been pointed at us, so if www resolves to the new host and the apex still resolves to the old one, half your links are secure and half are not. Point both, pick one as canonical, redirect the other.
What happens to a shop whose domain expires mid-season?
The name usually stops resolving, so the shop, the confirmation e-mails and the gateway callbacks all stop together. Roughly thirty days of grace follow, then redemption at a steep registry fee, then auction. It is the one outage no amount of hosting redundancy protects you from, and auto-renew is the entire fix.
Should I register the plural and the common misspelling?
For a shop, usually yes. They cost a registration each and redirect to the canonical hostname in one line. The alternative is discovering later that somebody else holds the version of your name that customers actually type, at which point it is no longer a cheap decision.
Keep reading
WooCommerce Hosting
Store-ready hosting with checkout headroom, and certificates that issue as each hostname points here.
Domain Names
Search, register and transfer names — including the plural and the misspelling worth holding.
Changing provider? Work through this checklist beforehand.
A straightforward running order for a migration your visitors never spot: which files travel first, how to bring the mail across without dropping a single message, the right moment to repoint DNS, and the two errors that sit behind almost every outage we get called in to fix.
Secure the name, then open the shop.
Year one of the registration on annual plans, SSL issued the moment the name points here, and a hosting renewal at the rate you ordered at.
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