Getting started questions

Yes. The first 30 days cost nothing and no payment card is needed to start. You get the full hosting account from day one, not a cut-down trial. After 30 days it is £0.99 a month, and if you decide not to continue you simply don’t pay.

An invoice for £0.99 appears in your client area and the hosting carries on as normal once you pay it. Nothing is charged automatically, because no card is held during the trial. If you don’t want to continue, don’t pay — the account is suspended after a few days and removed later.

No. You can create the account and use the hosting for 30 days without entering any card details. You only add a payment method when you decide to continue past the free month.

Log in to the client area and open your hosting service — there is a link straight into DirectAdmin, already signed in. You can also go to your server’s DirectAdmin address on port 2222 and use the username and password from your welcome email.

DirectAdmin is the control panel where you manage your hosting: files, email addresses, databases, DNS records, SSL and backups. It is what you use instead of needing to know how to administer a server. Traxio accounts use the Evolution interface.

No, but they do the same job. DirectAdmin and cPanel are both hosting control panels with file managers, email, databases and DNS tools — the menus are laid out differently and the names of a few features differ. If you have used cPanel, DirectAdmin will feel familiar within a few minutes.

3GB of NVMe storage, 100GB of monthly bandwidth, DirectAdmin, free SSL, one email account on your domain, one MySQL database, one FTP account, PHP 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3, cron jobs and one-click app installs, for one domain you already own.

For most small sites, comfortably. A WordPress install is around 100MB, and a site with several years of text posts and reasonably sized images usually stays under 1GB. Storage runs out fastest on video, large photo libraries and uncompressed downloads.

Bandwidth is measured monthly and the counter resets at the start of each month. If a site consistently exceeds 100GB you will hear about it rather than being cut off without warning — the usual causes are large media files, an unexpected traffic spike, or bots.

Yes. One domain is included, and each extra domain is a £0.99 one-off add-on from the client area. Subdomains on your existing domain are included at no extra cost.

In a data centre in Montreal, Canada, on Traxio’s DirectAdmin hosting platform. Traxio itself is a UK business.

The hosting account itself is ready within minutes of signing up. Getting your domain pointing at it usually takes a few hours for DNS to update worldwide, occasionally up to 24. Uploading a site or installing WordPress takes about ten minutes once the domain resolves.

Softaculous is the one-click application installer in DirectAdmin. It sets up WordPress and 400+ other applications for you — creating the database, unpacking the files and running the installer — in about two minutes.