Issue tracking and bug reporting tools for software development teams to log, prioritise, and resolve defects efficiently. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
Bug tracking software is where defects go to be argued about properly: a report, a severity, somebody it is assigned to, a status that moves, and a history nobody can quietly rewrite. MantisBT is the one application in this category and it is a survivor. It first appeared in 2000, it is still shipping, and version 2.28.4 was released on 1 July 2026 with fixes for a critical authentication bypass plus seven other issues.
The obvious alternatives all charge per seat. Jira is free to ten users and then bills per user per month. Linear lists at US$10 per user per month on Basic and US$16 on Business when billed annually, with its free tier capped at 250 issues. GitHub Issues comes with the repository at no extra cost, which makes it the honest default for a team already living in GitHub. Azure Boards and GitLab tell the same story from different vendors.
What self-hosting buys is not really the licence saving on your own developers, who are being paid either way. It is that reporters are free. A tracker where clients, testers or the public can raise a defect without you buying them an account has completely different economics to one charging per seat, and the data stays in a MySQL database you can export, on a server whose location you can name in a contract. MantisBT is GPL licensed, so the software costs nothing and the hosting is the whole bill.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
A ten-person web agency needs a private project per client, where the client staff can raise and confirm bugs during sign-off. On per-seat pricing that means paying for accounts used intensively for three weeks and then dormant for a year; on a self-hosted tracker adding them costs nothing at all.
Unreleased product detail, photographs and test logs often cannot go into an unspecified global SaaS region under the contracts these teams work to. A MantisBT install on a UK package with a named administrator answers the question directly, and the tracker history doubles as the record of who changed what.
Five regular maintainers and hundreds of occasional reporters is the worst possible shape for per-seat pricing, and forcing reporters onto a particular code-hosting account loses reports. A self-hosted tracker with public submission keeps the issue history portable and independent of wherever the code happens to live this decade.
Contracts that name a data location turn tooling into a procurement question rather than a preference. Self-hosting means the answer is a data centre you picked, in a country you can name, with a data processing agreement you can actually produce when somebody asks for it.
Only the latest 2.x stable release is fully supported and receives security and bug fixes.
That one sentence sets out your maintenance obligation. There is no long-term support branch to settle onto, so a working installation sitting on last quarter's point release is not a finished job. The July 2026 release fixed a critical authentication bypass, which is exactly the class of bug that turns an unpatched tracker into somebody else's problem.
Backup your existing installation and database -- really!
The emphasis is earned. MantisBT upgrades are file replacements, and the project tells you to extract into a clean directory because files get moved and deleted between releases, so unpacking over the top leaves stale PHP reachable from the web. Daily backups cover the mistake, which is why testing a restore before the upgrade beats discovering it afterwards.
Bug trackers live or die on database performance and email throughput. We tune MySQL with enough innodb_buffer_pool to keep the open-issue index in RAM, and we configure outbound SMTP properly because half the value of a tracker is the notification stream. Cron runs every minute on every plan, which matters for stale-ticket sweeps and SLA timers. For teams above roughly fifty active developers, we move the database onto a small managed cloud server.
The default that catches people is attachment storage. MantisBT can put uploaded files in the database or on disk, and the documented default is the database, so a year of screenshots, logs and crash dumps ends up inside MySQL and inside whatever database allowance the plan carries. Switch it to disk storage, then remember your backup now has to cover two things rather than one.
Uploads fail in confusing ways when the application limit, PHP's upload_max_filesize and post_max_size disagree with each other, so set all three deliberately. PHP version is selectable per package in the My365i control panel, which matters here: stable 2.28.4 still declares PHP 7.4 as its floor while the development branch has moved to 8.1, and 7.4 left security support years ago. Install on a current PHP 8 branch.
Email is the other one. Every report, note and status change can notify several watchers, and with queued sending switched off, a user's page load waits while those messages crawl out over SMTP. Turn the queue on and run send_emails.php from cron.
Skip this entirely if your developers already live in GitHub or GitLab. A second tracker means a second set of accounts and a second place to look, and Issues is already included.
Common questions we hear from people running bug tracking software applications on 365i hosting.
Yes. Version 2.28.4 was released on 1 July 2026 with fixes for a critical authentication bypass in the SOAP API and seven other issues, following several point releases over the preceding months. The project is explicit that only the latest 2.x stable release is fully supported, so an installation sitting on an older point release is not covered by anything. That is the trade with a small, long-lived open-source tracker: it is alive, but keeping up with it is your job.
Stable 2.28.4 declares PHP 7.4 as its minimum and the development branch has moved to 8.1. Do not read 7.4 as a target, because it left security support years ago. Install on a current PHP 8 branch, which you select per package in the My365i control panel, and check any plugins you depend on first. The database side is undemanding, with MySQL 5.5 or later in the official requirements, which every plan here comfortably exceeds.
If your developers already work in GitHub or GitLab, use the Issues that came with the repository and stop reading here. A second tracker means a second set of accounts, a second place to look and an integration to maintain. MantisBT earns its place when the reporters are not developers: clients signing off work, external testers, the public. Those are the accounts per-seat pricing punishes you for, and Jira is free only to ten users while Linear lists at US$10 per user per month on Basic.
By default they go into the database, and that is the first setting to change. MantisBT supports database or disk storage for uploaded files, and the documented default puts screenshots, logs and crash dumps inside MySQL, where they count against your database allowance and make every backup heavier than it needs to be. Switch to disk storage, keep the upload directory properly protected, and remember that backups now need to cover the files as well as the database.
Because notification email is being sent during the page request. Every report, note, assignment and status change can notify several watchers, so a busy issue on a project with a lot of subscribers can mean dozens of SMTP deliveries while one poor user stares at a loading tab. Turn on the email queue and run the send_emails.php script from cron every few minutes so sending happens in the background. Use authenticated SMTP rather than raw PHP mail, and get SPF, DKIM and DMARC right on the domain.
Extracting the new release on top of the old one. The project tells you to unpack into a clean directory because files move and get deleted between versions, and unpacking in place leaves stale PHP files reachable from the web. The admin directory also has to be removed once the upgrade finishes, because leaving it on a public installation is a real exposure. Take a backup first and check you can restore it. Every package here is backed up daily with 30 days of restore points, but an untested restore is a hope rather than a plan.
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