FAQ
Forum hosting questions, answered plainly
Including the awkward ones. If something here reads as a limitation rather than a feature, that is deliberate — you should know before you sign up, not after.
The offer and the price
Is the forum hosting free forever?
No. It is free for 30 days, then £0.99 a month if you choose to continue. Anyone offering forum hosting free forever is paid another way — usually adverts on your boards, a subdomain you do not own, or limits designed to force an upgrade.
Do I have to give card details to start?
No. The trial is signed up for without any payment information, which also means nothing can be charged to you automatically. Payment details are only taken if you decide to continue after 30 days.
What exactly happens after 30 days?
An invoice for £0.99 appears in your Traxio client area. Pay it and the forum carries on at that price. Ignore it and the account is suspended 7 days after the invoice date and terminated after 14, without any charge. Take a backup before then if you might want your data.
Is £0.99 the total, or does VAT get added?
It is the total. Traxio is not VAT registered, so no VAT is added, and there are no card or processing fees on top. £11.88 a year is the whole hosting cost.
Do I need my own domain name?
Yes. Domains aren’t included and there are no forums on a traxio.uk subdomain, so you will need a domain you own — from any registrar, usually £8–£12 a year. It stays yours regardless of what happens to your hosting.
Which forum software is supported?
MyBB, phpBB and SMF install in one click through Softaculous. Flarum can be installed by hand if you are comfortable with Composer over SSH, but it isn’t one of the packages we document. Any other PHP and MySQL forum package can be installed manually. Discourse cannot run on shared hosting anywhere — it requires Docker and a dedicated server.
Running your forum
Can I install more than one forum?
Yes, within the same account and its 3GB and 100GB limits — on a subdomain of your domain or in a subdirectory. Each forum needs its own database: one is included, and extra databases are £0.99 each, once. A second community on its own domain needs an extra domain, also £0.99 once.
How many members and posts can it handle?
Storage is rarely the constraint: forum text is small, and a board with tens of thousands of posts may only use a couple of hundred megabytes of database. Bandwidth is rarely the ceiling either: 100GB a month is tens of thousands of visits for a typical forum, depending on how image-heavy your theme and attachments are.
What happens if my forum outgrows the plan?
You will be told rather than silently throttled. You can add disk (£0.99/month per 5GB) or bandwidth (£0.99/month per 50GB) in the client area; beyond that, the honest advice is a VPS or a larger plan elsewhere. Your data is exportable in full, so growing out of Traxio is a copy job rather than a rebuild. A community that busy is a good problem to have.
Will you put adverts on my forum?
Never. Traxio does not inject banners, branded footers or tracking into hosted sites, and does not sell data about your members. That is what the 99p pays for.
Can I run adverts on my own forum?
Yes. It is your community and your ad space, subject to the acceptable use policy.
How do I stop spam registrations?
Turn on email verification and a CAPTCHA before you open registration, and moderate first posts for the first few weeks. MyBB, phpBB and SMF all support this out of the box, and phpBB and MyBB have well-maintained anti-spam extensions. Prevention is far less work than cleanup.
Will registration and notification emails actually arrive?
The account includes email on your domain and the forum can send through the local mail server or an external SMTP service. Add SPF and DKIM records in the DirectAdmin DNS editor — without them, a good share of forum mail lands in spam folders. This is true of every host, not just this one.
Can I use my own theme or mods?
Yes. You have FTP, a file manager and database access, so any theme, plugin, mod or language pack for your forum software can be installed. Traxio also publishes free SMF themes if you want a modern starting point.
Support, data and the small print
Can I move an existing forum to Traxio?
Yes — copy the files, import the database with phpMyAdmin, update the configuration file and then switch DNS. How it works sets out the order to do it in so the forum is barely offline.
Does Traxio support help me build or fix my forum?
No. Support covers hosting: the server, DirectAdmin, DNS, mail, SSL, outages and account matters. Building a forum, debugging a plugin or fixing a theme is outside that scope, and that boundary is part of how hosting stays at 99p. Your forum software's own community is the right place for those questions.
Is my forum backed up?
Treat backups as yours. DirectAdmin can produce a full backup of files and database on demand — do it before upgrades and on a schedule you keep, and store a copy off the server. Owning your community means owning a copy of it.
Where are the servers?
Montreal, Canada. Traxio is run from the UK and prices in pounds. For a UK or European audience the latency difference is small, but if you need servers physically in the UK, another host will suit you better. Network details.
Is Traxio.uk a different company from Traxio.co.uk?
No — same company, same hosting, same client area, same plan and price. Traxio.uk is the forum-focused sister site, because someone launching a community has different questions from someone launching a shop. You order through the same Traxio client area from either site.
Can I host a Discord alternative or a chat platform?
Some PHP chat packages will run, but anything needing Node.js, Docker, websockets or a long-running process will not work on shared hosting. Forum software is a good fit here precisely because it is ordinary PHP and MySQL.
Try it rather than read about it
Thirty days, no card details, a complete hosting account.
Start your forum free Help desk
Free for 30 days with no card details required. Then £0.99/month if you choose to continue.