Domain, hosting and SSL for a business website: enough without overspending

These three are a website's infrastructure, and all three are easy to get wrong in opposite directions: overpaying for what you never use, or economising in the one place you should not.

The domain

.vn or .com

.com.vn or .vn — signals a Vietnamese business, and domestic customers trust it more. 250,000–800,000 VND a year. Company paperwork is required for .com.vn.

.com — cheaper at around 300,000 VND a year, no paperwork, and necessary if you have customers abroad.

If budget allows, register both and redirect one to the other. The extra cost is small and it stops somebody else buying a near-copy of your name.

Three rules for choosing a name

1. It can be read over the phone without spelling it out. The test: read it to somebody by phone and see if they type it correctly.
2. No hyphens and no digits. Customers mistype them, and a competitor buys the version without the hyphen.
3. Shorter is better, but clear beats short.

The thing that matters most: it is in your name

Register with your own email and details, paid with your card. If the web agency registers it for you, check whois afterwards to confirm you are the registrant.

This is the most painful thing to lose, because every Google ranking and every printed document points at it. More in the source ownership article.

Hosting

Three kinds, and which you need

Shared hosting — 600,000–2 million VND a year. Many websites on one server. Adequate for a company brochure site under about 3,000 views a day.

The real drawback: when another site on the same machine gets overloaded, yours slows down too. You have no control over that.

A VPS — 1.5–5 million VND a year. You get dedicated resources. Needed for a shop, anything with an admin area, or anything running a real database.

A deployment platform — Vercel, Netlify and similar. Free tiers are usable for small sites, and paid tiers run around $20 a month. No server administration, and it scales automatically under traffic.

Choosing simply

• A brochure site with rarely changing content → shared hosting or a platform free tier
• A site with an admin area and a database → a VPS or a paid platform tier
• Internal software with business data → a VPS, with automated daily backups

What to check that few people check

Where the server is. For Vietnamese visitors, a server in Vietnam or Singapore is roughly 150–250 milliseconds per request faster than one in the United States. That lands directly on your LCP.

Whether backups exist and whether you can download them. Many providers take backups but will not let you take a copy away. A backup you cannot hold is not your backup.

What renewal costs. The first year is usually promotional. Ask for the second-year price before buying.

SSL

The simplest part: SSL should be free.

Let's Encrypt issues free certificates that renew automatically and are trusted by every browser. Nearly all hosting and platforms now include it.

If somebody offers you an "SSL certificate at 1.5 million VND a year" for an ordinary business website, that is a cost you do not need. Paid certificates only make sense in specific cases, such as needing transaction warranty cover or an organisation-validated certificate showing the company name.

What to check: open your site without https and see whether it redirects. If both addresses work, you have two versions of your website as far as Google is concerned.

Realistic annual cost

For a small business website, done properly:

If somebody quotes 15 million a year to maintain a brochure website, ask what the other 11 million is. There may be a fair answer — maintenance, content updates — but it should be called by its real name rather than "hosting fees".

With our templates

Our templates run on Next.js, so you have both options: deploy to a platform like Vercel on its free tier, or run it on your own VPS. The included documentation covers both.

There is no platform lock-in — we do not require you to host anywhere specific, and we charge nothing after the purchase.