Help & documentation
Guides, references and troubleshooting for TDesk.

What's included

Every TDesk tier (Free trial through Enterprise) includes the entire stack — panel, server, bandwidth, and every service below. There are no add-ons to buy, no per-feature charges, and no separate licences for the bundled tools.

The server itself

  • Bare-metal or VPS provisioned and run by us — you don't buy hardware separately
  • NVMe SSD storage across all tiers (faster on Premium+ pool)
  • Unlimited bandwidth (fair-use policy)
  • UK datacentre — low-latency for UK customers, simpler GDPR compliance
  • 99.9% uptime SLA
  • DDoS mitigation at the network edge

Web hosting

  • nginx with PHP-FPM
  • Multiple PHP versions per site — 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, switchable per domain
  • HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 supported automatically
  • Compression (gzip + brotli) on text responses
  • Custom error pages per site
  • WAF — mod_security with OWASP Core Rule Set

Email

  • Dovecot for IMAP and POP3 (TLS-secured)
  • Postfix for SMTP submission with STARTTLS
  • MxGuard — built-in AI-based anti-spam gateway. Every inbound email is scored by a machine-learning model, with adjustable thresholds (reject / quarantine / tag). Quarantined messages can be released or deleted from the panel, and daily digest summaries are sent to recipients.
  • ClamAV — antivirus scanning on attachments and message bodies
  • DKIM signing via OpenDKIM — outbound mail signed per-domain
  • DMARC alignment via OpenDMARC — inbound and outbound
  • SPF records auto-published for each domain
  • SnappyMail webmail — modern browser webmail with multi-account, contacts, folders
  • Mailbox autoresponders, vacation messages, forwarders, aliases, catch-alls

DNS

  • Three authoritative nameservers for redundancy (different geographic locations)
  • Full record-type support — A, AAAA, MX, TXT, CNAME, NS, SRV, CAA
  • DNSSEC available for signed zones
  • GeoDNS for regional traffic routing
  • Zone editor with friendly form plus raw zonefile view
  • Round-robin and weighted records supported

SSL / TLS

  • Let's Encrypt certificates auto-issued and auto-renewed for every domain and subdomain
  • Custom certificate upload supported (paid wildcards, EV certs, etc.)
  • HTTP → HTTPS auto-redirect per site
  • HSTS opt-in per domain
  • Force-SSL toggle per domain

Databases

  • MySQL / MariaDB and PostgreSQL 16
  • phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin web access
  • Per-customer database users (no shared accounts — full isolation)
  • External connections supported via IP allow-listing

File management

  • Browser-based file manager with drag-drop upload
  • Built-in editor with syntax highlighting (PHP, JS, CSS, HTML, etc.)
  • SFTP per customer (no FTP — only secure transports)
  • Zip / tar archive extraction in place
  • Live disk-usage tracking

Backups

  • Daily automatic backups (hourly on Pro+, configurable)
  • 30-day retention on rolling schedule
  • Per-file and whole-site restore from any backup point
  • Pre-deploy snapshots before major site changes
  • Off-site replication included

Security

  • fail2ban — auto-blocks brute-force attempts on SSH, IMAP, SMTP, panel login
  • CrowdSec — community-driven threat intelligence, blocks known bad actors
  • Imunify — daily malware scanning on hosted sites with quarantine
  • WAF (mod_security + OWASP rules) in front of every site
  • Per-customer process isolation (chroot + cgroups, no cross-customer access)
  • Two-factor authentication on the panel
  • MXGuard — AI antispam gateway on every domain (details)
  • Veritus — signup-fraud screening on registration (details)

Monitoring

  • Uptime checks — HTTP, HTTPS, port, ping — from multiple regions
  • Email and dashboard alerts when something goes down
  • Live resource graphs — CPU, RAM, disk, network traffic
  • Cron scheduling with full last-run output captured

Ecommerce

  • Full storefront — products, categories, cart and checkout on any hosted domain
  • Ten bespoke themes with a visual theme editor (logo, hero, colours, nav, footer)
  • Stripe & PayPal payments, VAT-inclusive pricing
  • Orders, customers and discount codes managed in-panel
  • CMS pages — About, Privacy, Terms and custom pages
  • Shop SEO — one-click scan that writes per-page titles & meta from your content, plus robots.txt, auto sitemap, Open Graph and Product structured data

Domains & services

  • Four hosting modes per domain — Website, Forwarding, No hosting, and Shop
  • Domain parking — branded for-sale and holding pages from templates
  • Dropcatch — catch expiring .uk / .co.uk domains, pay on success
  • Nominet-accredited registrar — register and manage .uk domains directly
  • Secondary DNS — slave zones for external primaries
  • Bring your own server — run TDesk on your own hardware (Superuser)

Support

  • This knowledge base + ticket system (all tiers)
  • Priority support on Premium and Enterprise
  • Phone support on Enterprise
  • Real humans during UK office hours, no scripted chatbots

What's the catch?

None of these are add-ons. There's no separate price for MxGuard, no SSL fees, no monitoring upcharge, no backup storage bill. The only thing that differs between tiers is the resource quotas (disk, domains, mailboxes, databases, etc.) — see Plans & pricing for the breakdown.

Need something specific not listed? Email support@tdesk.uk — we'll either tell you it's already there, or build it.