One thing you are forbidden to do at the beginning is to never keep your Bitcoin holdings on a central exchange. The control of the central exchange is completely dependent on a third party and if for some reason the central exchange gets hacked, you will lose your Bitcoin holdings forever.
However, if you are thinking of holding for the long term, then of course you can decide to use a hardware wallet. In this case, by using a hardware wallet, you will be in complete control of the crypto you are holding. And it will not be in an undesirable situation like being hacked.
Many new users make this mistake because they do not fully get dangers. Using exchange to store Bitcoin means trusting someone else. If that exchange gets hacked or goes out of business we could lose our Bitcoin forever.
Your suggestion to hold Bitcoin for long time to use hardware wallet is best way to keep it safe. Hardware wallet gives full control over our private keys. This means we own our Bitcoin and do not have to rely on someone else security. It greatly lowers chance of losing our crypto because of hacks or other bad things that can happen with centralized exchanges. Basically it is our own bank which is main goal of cryptocurrency.