Lead web developer for national non-profit company
Worked with all kinds of Wordpress websites small & big
Worked for a cosmetics company to redesign their Wordpress site
Helped startup companies launch a website from scratch
It really depends on your relationship with this person, which I didn't think you mention. Do you know him and trust him?
If you trust him that's fine. The only issue I see is the time zone difference, you'll just have to work it out between the two of you.
A good web host that has apache, nginx, php, mysql
It's best to keep it simple