Community hosting
Hosting for communities, not just websites
Clubs, fan communities, support groups, hobby collectives, alumni networks, local associations. If the point of the site is that members talk to each other, this is the shape of hosting you need — free for 30 days, then £0.99 a month.
Why communities keep leaving the big platforms
Most groups start where the people already are: a Facebook group, a WhatsApp thread, a Discord server. It works, until the platform's interests and the community's stop matching. The complaints are remarkably consistent.
Posts reach a fraction of members, because a feed decides what gets shown. Anything said more than a week ago is unfindable, so the same questions are asked forever and the good answers are lost. Moderation is a blunt instrument you do not control. Nothing is indexed, so the community cannot be found by anyone who is not already in it. And the whole thing exists at the discretion of a company that can change the rules, or close the group, without appeal or explanation.
A forum answers all five: threaded and permanent, searchable and indexed, your moderation, your rules, your database. What it asks in return is a domain name, 99p a month, and somebody willing to tend it.
What a community needs that a brochure site does not
Same hosting account; different parts of it under load.
Email that reliably arrives
Verifications, password resets and notification digests are the plumbing of a community. Email on your own domain (one account included, extras £0.99 each, once), plus SPF and DKIM records you add in the DirectAdmin DNS editor.
Permissions that fit your structure
Committee-only boards, members-only sections, a public front board for search engines. All three one-click packages handle this; SMF is the most fine-grained.
Bandwidth for readers, not visitors
Members browse far more pages per session than a website's visitors do. 100GB a month here is tens of thousands of visits for a typical forum.
Room for attachments
Photos, PDFs, minutes, event flyers. 3GB is a great deal of text but not much photography, so an image-heavy community should plan for that early — extra disk is £0.99/month per 5GB.
Somewhere to keep the knowledge
The reason a forum beats chat: a good answer written once stays findable for years, by members and by Google.
A handover that survives volunteers
Use a shared committee mailbox as the account and admin address, and appoint more than one administrator. Communities outlast the person who set them up — if the credentials do.
Forum, chat, or both?
Chat platforms are excellent at conversation happening now and hopeless at keeping anything. Forums are the reverse. Plenty of healthy communities run both deliberately: chat for the day-to-day, the forum for anything worth finding again — guides, decisions, archives, announcements.
If you can only run one, ask what the community is for. If it exists to answer questions, accumulate knowledge, or be discovered by new people, a forum is the format. If it exists for live company, chat is.
Being the operator
Running a community means holding members' data — email addresses at minimum, plus posts, private messages and IP logs. That makes you responsible for it: a privacy policy your members can read, a route for deletion requests, and no more data collected than the forum needs. All three packages have settings for log retention and account deletion.
It also means moderation is now a job. Write the rules before you need them; enforcing a published rule is straightforward, inventing one mid-argument is not.
One plan, one price
The same hosting account Traxio.co.uk sells, described for people running a forum. One plan, no tiers, no upsell.
30 days free
Traxio Free Start
Free for 30 days, then £0.99/month
Launch your communityNo card required to start · No setup fee · Bring your own domain
- 3GB NVMe SSD storageRoom for your forum software, its database, member uploads and attachments.
- 100GB bandwidth per monthTens of thousands of visits a month for a typical forum — plenty for a new or growing community.
- DirectAdmin control panelThe real thing: file manager, DNS editor, databases, email, cron, PHP switching.
- Free SSL certificate (auto-renewing)Members will not register on a forum the browser marks as insecure.
- Softaculous one-click installerMyBB, phpBB and SMF install from a form — no manual database setup.
- PHP 7.4 – 8.3, switchableMatch whichever version your forum software recommends, per domain.
- MySQL / MariaDB databaseOne included — what one forum needs — with phpMyAdmin for backups and imports.
- FTP & file manager accessUpload themes, mods and plugins, or edit a template in the browser.
- Email on your domainOne email account included, for registration and notification mail from you@yourforum.com.
- Cron jobsScheduled pruning, digests and maintenance tasks forum packages expect.
- AI-assisted help deskKnowledgebase first, then the help desk: AI replies, and a person steps in when a request is escalated.
- Add-ons if you need themExtra email accounts, domains, databases or FTP accounts are £0.99 each, once. More disk is £0.99/month per 5GB; more bandwidth £0.99/month per 50GB. All add-ons
Full technical specification: DirectAdmin hosting on Traxio.co.uk.
Community hosting questions
What is community hosting?
Hosting for a place where members talk to each other, rather than a site that publishes at readers. In practice that means forum software on PHP and MySQL hosting, with reliable outbound email and enough bandwidth for logged-in members who read many pages per visit.
Can I move my Facebook group to a forum?
You can move the community, but not the posts — Facebook provides no usable bulk export of group content. The workable approach is to run both for a few weeks, rewrite your best recurring threads as fresh topics on the forum, and give members a concrete reason to come across. The full method is here.
Is a forum better than a Discord server?
They do different jobs. Discord is excellent for live conversation and terrible at keeping knowledge: good answers scroll away and cannot be found or indexed. A forum is slower and more permanent. Many communities run both — chat for now, forum for the record.
Can a club or charity run its community here?
Yes, and £11.88 a year is generally easier to get approved than a subscription service. Set up a shared committee mailbox as the account and forum admin address so handover does not depend on one volunteer's personal email.
Do we need a separate website as well?
Not necessarily — most forum software can serve a front page, and you can install a static page or WordPress alongside the forum on the same account within the plan's limits.
Who owns the community's data?
You do. Full database and file access, exportable whenever you want. As the operator of the forum you are also the data controller for your members' information, which is worth reading up on if the community is more than a handful of friends.
Give your community an address of its own
Free for 30 days, then £0.99 a month. No adverts, no algorithm, no landlord.
Free for 30 days with no card details required. Then £0.99/month if you choose to continue.