MyBB
Light, fast and genuinely beginner-friendly. A good default if you have never run a forum before — clean admin panel, sensible defaults, active plugin ecosystem.
Free Forum Hosting
Free forum hosting for communities that want to own their platform
MyBB, phpBB and SMF install in one click on real PHP and MySQL hosting. Free for 30 days, then £0.99 a month — and no algorithm deciding who sees your posts.
Exactly what “free” means here
- Free for 30 days. A full hosting account with nothing held back — no feature restrictions during the trial.
- No card details required to start. You can sign up and run your site for the whole 30 days without giving us any payment information.
- Nothing can be charged automatically, because we have nothing to charge. Payment details are only taken if you decide to continue.
- Then £0.99/month if you choose to carry on. That is the ongoing price — it does not rise after the first year.
- No setup fee and no hidden charges of any kind.
- You bring your own domain. Traxio does not sell domain names, so you will need one you already own or register elsewhere.
Forum software
Install the forum you want
All installable through Softaculous, database and configuration included.
phpBB
The long-standing heavyweight. Huge extension library, mature moderation tools and two decades of documentation for every problem you will hit.
SMF
Simple Machines Forum. Stable, well-organised permissions, and a strong choice for communities that need fine-grained control over who can see what.
Flarum
Modern, single-page and pleasant to use. Installable here, though it expects Composer and a bit more setup than the one-click options.
Why a forum
Leaving the algorithm behind
A great many communities live in Facebook groups, and the frustrations are consistent enough to be predictable. Posts reach a fraction of members because the feed decides what gets shown. Older discussions are effectively unfindable — there is no thread structure and search is poor. Moderation tools are blunt. And the whole community exists at the discretion of a platform that can change the rules, or remove the group, without warning or appeal.
A forum inverts all of that. Every member sees every thread in the section they are subscribed to. Discussions are organised into boards and threads, permanently addressable, and indexed by Google — which means old threads keep bringing in new members for years. You set the moderation rules. You export the database whenever you want.
Moving without losing people
The realistic path is gradual. Run both for a while. Pick the five or six discussions your group has repeatedly, and start them as proper threads on the new forum so it does not look empty on arrival. Then give people a concrete reason to visit — announcements posted there first, files and resources hosted there, a section that only exists on the forum. The group becomes a signpost rather than the destination.
Technical fit
What forum software needs, and gets
MySQL databases
Forums are database-driven. You get real MySQL/MariaDB databases with phpMyAdmin access for backups and imports.
Modern PHP
PHP 7.4 through 8.3, switchable per domain, so you can match whatever version your forum software recommends.
Free SSL
HTTPS from the start. Members are not going to register on a site the browser flags as insecure.
Email that works
Registration confirmations and notification emails send from your own domain. Add SPF and DKIM in the DNS editor for good deliverability.
Cron jobs
Scheduled tasks for pruning, digests and maintenance routines that most forum packages expect to run.
FTP & file manager
Upload themes and plugins directly, or edit template files in the browser when something needs a tweak.
One plan, one price
Traxio Free Start
We stopped running four tiers. There is one plan, it does everything, and it costs less than a coffee per year.
30 Days Free
Traxio Free Start
FREE
for 30 days — then £0.99/month
- 5GB NVMe SSD storage
- 10GB bandwidth per month
- DirectAdmin control panel
- Free SSL certificate (auto-renewing)
- Softaculous one-click installer
- PHP 7.4 – 8.3, switchable
- MySQL / MariaDB databases
- FTP & file manager access
- Email accounts on your domain
- Cron jobs
- Community-powered support
No card required to start • No setup fee • Bring your own domain
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Which forum software can I install?
MyBB, phpBB and SMF all install in one click through Softaculous. Flarum is also installable, though it expects Composer and a slightly more hands-on setup — workable, but not the easiest first project. Discourse is not supported, because it requires Docker and a dedicated server rather than shared hosting.
Is shared hosting powerful enough to run a forum?
For a new or small-to-medium community, yes. Forum software is mostly PHP and MySQL, which is exactly what shared hosting is built for. The practical ceiling here is the 10GB monthly bandwidth — roughly a few thousand active visits a month. A busy forum with heavy attachments will outgrow it.
Can I move a Facebook group to a real forum?
You cannot export the posts — Facebook does not provide a usable bulk export of group content — but you can move the community. The usual approach is to run both in parallel for a few weeks, seed the forum with your best recurring threads rewritten as fresh topics, and give members a reason to come across, such as content posted there first.
Do I need to know PHP to run a forum?
No. MyBB, phpBB and SMF are all administered through a web interface. You will occasionally edit a template or install a plugin, but day-to-day moderation and configuration needs no code.
How do I stop spam registrations?
All three main packages support CAPTCHA and moderated first posts out of the box, and phpBB and MyBB have well-maintained anti-spam extensions. Enabling email verification and a question-based CAPTCHA eliminates most automated signups.
Will forum emails (registration, notifications) work?
Yes — the account includes email on your domain, and the forum can send through the local mail server or an external SMTP service. For reliable delivery at any volume we recommend configuring SPF and DKIM records, which you can add yourself in the DirectAdmin DNS editor.