PHP 7.4 – 8.3
Switch version per domain from the panel. Run a legacy app on 7.4 and a new project on 8.3 under the same account.
Free PHP Hosting
Free PHP hosting for people who write the code themselves
PHP 7.4 to 8.3, switchable per domain. Real MySQL databases, cron jobs, FTP, error logs and .htaccess control. Free for 30 days, then £0.99 a month.
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.
The developer bits
What you actually get to configure
MySQL / MariaDB
Multiple databases with full user privilege control, plus phpMyAdmin for queries, imports and exports.
Cron jobs
Standard crontab scheduling from DirectAdmin, down to one-minute intervals.
Error logs & .htaccess
Read your PHP error log directly, and control rewrites, headers and caching with Apache .htaccess rules.
Composer & vendor deploys
Install dependencies, or build locally and deploy the vendor directory over FTP — whichever fits your workflow.
SSL & SFTP
Free auto-renewing certificates, and encrypted file transfer so you are not sending credentials in plain text.
Fit assessment
What shared hosting can and cannot do
Shared hosting is the right tool for a large number of PHP projects and the wrong tool for a few. It is worth being clear about which is which before you build.
Works well here
Classic LAMP applications, WordPress and its ecosystem, forum and CMS packages, small Laravel and Symfony projects, internal tools, client sites, APIs with modest traffic, and anything that is fundamentally “request in, database query, response out”.
Does not work here
Anything needing root, a persistent daemon, Docker, WebSockets, or a language runtime other than PHP. Long-running queue workers are the usual sticking point — the workaround is a cron-triggered worker that processes a batch and exits, which is fine for most workloads but not for real-time processing.
Heavy CPU work will also hit shared-hosting fair-use limits. Image processing a handful of uploads is fine; transcoding video is not.
The honest resource picture
5GB of NVMe storage and 10GB of monthly bandwidth. For a development environment, a portfolio of small client sites, or a side project finding its audience, that is comfortable. For anything with serious traffic it is not, and you would be better served by a VPS. We would rather say so than take your 99p and watch you hit a wall.
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 PHP versions are available?
PHP 7.4 through 8.3, selectable per domain from DirectAdmin. You can change version without raising a ticket, which is useful when a legacy application will not run on 8.x or when you want to test an upgrade.
Can I use Composer?
Composer works for installing dependencies, and vendor directories can be uploaded via FTP if you prefer to build locally. Note that shared hosting has no persistent shell session, so long-running Composer operations are better done on your machine and deployed.
Are cron jobs available?
Yes, configured through DirectAdmin. Minimum interval is one minute. Typical uses are queue workers, scheduled imports, WordPress cron replacement and nightly backup scripts.
Can I see PHP error logs?
Yes. Error logs are accessible from the file manager, and you can set display_errors and error_reporting per site through the panel or a local php.ini. Do not leave display_errors on in production.
Which PHP extensions are enabled?
The common set: mysqli, PDO, curl, mbstring, gd, zip, json, openssl, intl, xml and opcache among others. If your application needs something unusual, check before committing — shared hosting cannot compile arbitrary extensions per account.
Can I run Laravel or Symfony?
Laravel and Symfony both run on shared hosting, with the caveat that the document root needs to point at the framework’s public directory. That is configurable in DirectAdmin. Queue workers that expect a persistent daemon are the main limitation — use cron-driven scheduling instead.