Get your first website online
The whole sequence from buying a domain to a page that loads, with the decision points explained.
Read the walkthrough →Hosting guides
Everything here is written for someone who does not have hosting yet. No account required, no assumed knowledge, and nothing that only makes sense if you are already a Traxio customer.
Most hosting advice is paid for
Buying hosting is unusually hard to research, because almost every comparison you will find is funded by affiliate commission — frequently £50 to £100 per signup, which is why the same handful of companies appear at the top of every list. That does not make those hosts bad. It does mean the ranking is not telling you what you think it is.
These guides are the opposite shape. They explain how the decisions work so you can evaluate any host, including this one, on your own terms.
Pick the decision you are stuck on
How much hosting do you need?
Turn storage and bandwidth numbers into an actual estimate for your site.
Work out your needs →What to look for in a web host
The checklist to run before paying anyone, in the order that catches problems earliest.
Run the checklist →Hosting red flags
The warning signs that reliably predict a bad experience, and the ones that do not.
Spot the warning signs →Hosting vs domain name
Two separate purchases that almost everyone conflates. What each one does.
Understand the difference →Hosting jargon explained
Nameservers, DNS, FTP, public_html, SSL, cron and the rest, defined in plain English.
Look up a term →Do you need expensive hosting?
What the extra money genuinely buys, and the cases where it buys nothing at all.
Read the analysis →Is cheap hosting any good?
What a low price reliably signals, what it does not, and how to tell the difference.
Read the answer →Hosting without a credit card
Why no-card signup changes the risk, and what your options actually are.
See the options →Host a website for 99p a month
The realistic total cost of getting and keeping a small site online for a year.
See the arithmetic →A sensible reading order
A reasonable order to read them in, if you are starting from nothing: work out what you are actually buying, then how much of it you need, then run the checklist against two or three candidates. That sequence takes about twenty minutes and will save you from the two mistakes that cost the most: buying capacity you will never use, and comparing introductory prices against each other.
If you already know what you want and are only checking whether a cheap plan is a false economy, is cheap hosting any good? and do you need expensive hosting? are the same question approached from each end, and between them cover most of the argument.
Where to go next
Once you have hosting, the useful material moves elsewhere: the knowledge base for reference and troubleshooting, the tutorials for step-by-step tasks in DirectAdmin, and the blog for longer explainers on how the underlying technology works.
About these guides
How do I choose a web host?
Work out what your site actually needs first, then check three things about any host that looks suitable: the renewal price rather than the introductory one, whether the resource limits are published as numbers, and what support explicitly does not cover. Those three tell you more than any feature list.
What is the difference between these guides and the knowledge base?
These are for deciding; the knowledge base is for doing. Nothing on this page assumes you have hosting yet. The knowledge base and the tutorials take over once you do.
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