Hosting is the cheapest part of a project and one of the most consequential, and it is usually decided by whoever happened to have an account somewhere.
Does the server need to be in the UAE?
For speed, usually not. A CDN in front of the site serves cached content from an edge location close to the visitor, and the origin server can be almost anywhere. Most of what a visitor downloads never touches it.
For dynamic responses the distance does matter, and a nearby region helps. Cloud providers offer UAE regions, and for an application with a lot of server round-trips that is worth the premium.
For data residency it is a legal question rather than a technical one. Certain sectors and certain government contracts require data to remain in the country, and that requirement decides the answer regardless of performance.
Shared hosting, VPS or managed platform
- Shared hosting. Fine for a small brochure site. You are sharing resources with strangers and cannot control much.
- VPS or cloud instance. Control and predictable performance, but somebody has to maintain it, patch it and watch it.
- Managed platform. Costs more per month, removes an entire category of work. For most businesses without an ops person, the correct answer.
What actually matters in the setup
Automated backups stored somewhere other than the server, and periodically restored to prove they work. A certificate that renews itself. A staging environment that matches production. Monitoring that alerts a person.
Those four are worth more than any amount of specification comparison, and they are what a support arrangement is actually buying you.
Whose name is on the account?
Yours. Always. Hosting and DNS registered to your company with your billing details, and the agency granted access. The most common emergency we are called into is a business that cannot reach its own domain because a former supplier holds it.