not a WP expert at all, do all my frontend work custom, but sometimes when the project needs a backend or database then i feel WP offers good infrastructure, correct? so just wondering if it would make sense to develop frontend of some projects on a different domain and setup the backend on a second domain for database purposes? or would that be overkill?
Sounds like a clear No to me, though I’m not sure why you are suggesting this anyway. What led you to this question?
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I’m with @ralphm - you wouldn’t need two domains. You can use different (or multiple) database hosts if you need too, but for most projects it would be overkill.
It would be good to know more about the question though 
basically wanting to avoid WP for frontend
and use WP when backend db is required
chris, so is it possible to have a non-WP website use WP only for it’s database functionality?
That doesn’t make any sense… How do you have a non-WP site that uses WP?
i think your answer says it all
not possible to use database functionality of WP (like for registrations or reservations) without entire site being WP based
That’s not to say you couldn’t borrow from the way WordPress does certain things.
Just seems rather pointless to bang the WordPress database into something to be used differently when it would be less work and more efficient to write your own implementation.
That can be useful in situations where you would like to separate admin traffic from regular traffic. Specifically if you are running a high volume website with separate servers – one (or more) for admin traffic and one (or more) for regular traffic. Every website I’ve worked in the last few years has done this so that admin operations don’t consume resources of users accessing the normal, front-end website. Though in order justify it the volume should be pretty high.
Yes. Though why you want to use WP as a service layer (REST) is beyond me. Unless you already had a WP website and now needed to expose data to external service providers via an API. Though that doesn’t seem the case here as this is a completely new website. Drupal 8 actually has built in support for restful web services and whole bunch of other powerful features that Wordpress does not have to facilitate a service layer.
Even from the limited description of the business problem your tackling Wordpress does not seem like a well informed option.
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chris, so is it possible to have a non-WP website use WP only for it’s database functionality?
@escocia1 sure, you can. But as others mention, it might not be the best choice, without knowing more about your requirements. I think the question is why use WordPress unless you’re going to use part of WordPress for something.
Where I’ve seen it work best is in publishing sites. Authors and editors use the WordPress admin to publish content, but the public-facing site is a custom web app using the WP API. Some popular news sites do this sort of thing.
If you do end up going down this path and you’re looking for more database options, here’s a recent article we published on the topic: http://www.sitepoint.com/high-availability-wordpress-with-hyperdb/.
Good luck with your project
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