Do I need a special server to host a virtual tour?

No. The tour is a folder of static files — HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, images, fonts — so anything that can serve an ordinary website can serve it. There is no database to create, no server-side language to enable and no application to keep running. If your current website host can display an HTML page, it can display the tour.

Will the tour work without an internet connection?

Yes. Everything the tour needs is inside the folder, including the fonts and the code, so a copy on a laptop or a memory stick runs with no network at all. That is what makes it usable on a trade stand, on a reception screen, or in a building where the connection is unreliable.

Does moving the tour to a different address break it?

No. The links inside the folder are relative, so the tour works wherever the folder is put, as long as the structure inside it is unchanged. What does break are links other people have already made to the old address, so leave a redirect from the old address to the new one rather than deleting the old location.

Can I put the tour behind a password?

Yes. Because it is ordinary static hosting, any access control your host offers applies to it: password protection on the directory, or a section of your site that already requires a login. Nothing inside the tour has to be changed for this, and nothing about it has to be re-built.

Will you host it for me instead?

Yes. Hosting on our own subdomain is €5 per GB of storage a month if you want it, and it changes nothing about ownership — you are handed the same folder either way and can move it whenever you like. Every tour in our published work runs on our subdomain, because that is what those clients chose; the files are theirs regardless.

Host your tour on your own domain

Ahmed Pemaj Last verified 1 September 2026 9 min read

A staircase inside a near-black interior, its treads and slim railing picked out by small directional light fittings so the flights read as separate stacked levels against matt dark walls.

The tour we hand over is a folder. Inside it are an entry HTML file, the panorama tiles, JavaScript, fonts, icons and any plans and media the build uses. Nothing in it needs a database, a server-side language or a build step, so it runs from anything that can serve static files: a subfolder of the site you already have, a subdomain of your own, or a laptop with no connection at all. This page is the whole procedure, and the checks worth running before you print the address.

There are two decisions in this, and after them it is an upload. The one worth slowing down for is the first: whether the tour lives inside the site you already have or on a subdomain of its own. That address is what you will print, email and link to for years, and changing it later breaks every link already sent. What arrives at handover describes the folder itself in full.

What is actually in the folder

An entry HTML file: The page that starts the tour, at the top level of the folder. Open this one and the tour runs. All a web address has to do is end up pointing at this file.
Panorama tiles: Each 360° photograph, cut into small images at several zoom levels, so a phone loads a coarse view immediately and fills in detail as the visitor looks around. This is most of the folder by both file count and size, and it is why a tour is a great many small files rather than a handful of large ones. Expect the upload to take longer than the file sizes suggest.
JavaScript and stylesheets: The code that runs the tour and the styling around the photographs. It runs in the visitor’s browser and nowhere else, which is why no server-side language is involved.
Fonts and icons: Shipped inside the folder rather than fetched at run time. Nothing in the tour calls out to a service that could withdraw it, rename it or start charging for it.
Media, plans and logos: Any photographs, audio, video and floor plans the build uses, plus your own marks. All of it travels with the folder.

Decide where it lives

Four places a tour folder can live, and what each one gives you
Where	The address it produces	Worth knowing
A subfolder of your existing site	yourdomain.com/tour/	The simplest. Nothing to configure beyond the upload; it inherits your certificate and your host.
A subdomain of your own	tour.yourdomain.com	Cleaner to print and to hand on. Needs one DNS record and a certificate of its own.
Our subdomain	A folder on our tour subdomain	We host it if you would rather not, at €5 per GB a month. The files are still yours and still portable.
A local copy	No address at all	For a reception screen, a trade stand or a laptop. The same folder, opened directly.

Four places a tour folder can live, and what each one gives you

These are not exclusive. A tour can be in two of them at once, and the folder is identical in each.

Put it in a subfolder of a site you already have

Unzip it, and keep the original
Unzip the delivery and keep the original archive: it is your master copy for the life of the tour. Do not rename anything inside the unzipped folder. The links between the files are relative, and renaming a folder breaks them.
Find the entry file
At the top level of the folder is an HTML file that starts the tour. Double-click it. If your browser refuses to run it from your own disk, that is the browser restricting what a local file may load, not a broken tour — it runs the moment it is served over HTTP.
Choose the folder name
It becomes part of the public address permanently. Use lower case, no spaces and no accented characters, and pick something you would be happy reading out over the telephone.
Upload the folder itself
Over FTP, SFTP or your host’s file manager, into the public directory of your site — usually public_html, www or htdocs. Upload the folder, not its contents, and keep the structure inside it as delivered.
Check the file count before you announce it
An interrupted upload does not look like an error. It looks like a working tour with one black panorama in the middle of it. Compare the number of files on the server with the number on your disk.
Open the address
yourdomain.com/tour/ — including the trailing slash. If your host does not serve the entry file automatically, put its filename on the end. Once it opens, that is the address.
Link to it from somewhere real
Your navigation, your booking page, your listing, your email signature. A tour nobody can reach from your homepage is a file rather than a tour, and this is the step people skip.

Put it on a subdomain of your own

Create the subdomain
In your hosting control panel, add a subdomain — tour.yourdomain.com is the usual choice — and let it create a directory. Note where that directory is, because it is where the files go.
Point DNS at it if your host did not
If your DNS is managed somewhere other than your hosting, add one record for the subdomain pointing at the same server as your main site: a CNAME to the main domain, or an A record with the same address. Allow a few hours before assuming it failed.
Upload the contents, not the folder
The one difference from the subfolder route. Put the contents of the tour folder into the subdomain’s directory, so the entry file sits at the root and the address needs nothing after the slash.
Issue the certificate
Most hosts do this automatically and some need one click. Do not skip it. A tour served over plain HTTP is marked as not secure, and it will be blocked outright by any page of yours that is served securely.
Redirect anything published earlier
If an address was already sent to anyone, redirect it to the new one rather than deleting it. Old links keep working, which costs one line of configuration.

Check it before you print the address

It opens over https, with no warning anywhere in the address bar.
Every station loads. Walk the whole tour once, end to end. A partial upload shows up as one black panorama halfway through rather than as an error.
It opens on a phone, on mobile data rather than on your own network.
It opens in a browser you do not normally use.
The address is spelt the way you want it printed, because from here it does not change without breaking links already sent.
Filenames survived the transfer. Many servers treat upper and lower case as different, so a file uploaded as Panorama1.jpg and requested as panorama1.jpg is missing on the server and present on your laptop.
The browser console is clean. Open it, reload, and look for failed requests. Anything in red is a file that did not arrive.
Directory listing is off, so opening the folder without the entry file does not show a visitor an index of your files.
You still hold the original archive, backed up somewhere that is not the web server it is published on.

If you are embedding it in a page

A tour does not have to be a page of its own. It can sit in a frame inside a page on your site, with the standalone address kept for emails and print. Two things matter: the page holding the frame must itself be served over HTTPS, or the browser blocks the tour inside it, and the frame needs a real height set on it, because a frame with no height computes to nothing and renders as a blank strip that looks exactly like a broken tour.

If it does not work

A blank white page almost always means the address is not resolving to the entry file. Add the filename to the end; if that works, the host simply is not serving a default file.
One black or missing panorama means an incomplete upload. Re-upload that part of the folder from the original archive rather than investigating it.
Works on your laptop, fails on the server: check filename case first, then whether every file transferred. Those two account for nearly all of it.
Worked yesterday, fails today: nothing inside a static folder changes on its own, so the cause is outside it. The standing procedure is here.

Every tour we deliver is a self-contained folder like this one, and every tour in our published work was handed over the same way. If you would rather not run a server, we will host it and you still keep the files — the rate card sets out what is included, and we will answer a hosting question whether or not we built the tour.

Questions people ask

Do I need a special server to host a virtual tour?: No. The tour is a folder of static files — HTML, JavaScript, stylesheets, images, fonts — so anything that can serve an ordinary website can serve it. There is no database to create, no server-side language to enable and no application to keep running. If your current website host can display an HTML page, it can display the tour.
Will the tour work without an internet connection?: Yes. Everything the tour needs is inside the folder, including the fonts and the code, so a copy on a laptop or a memory stick runs with no network at all. That is what makes it usable on a trade stand, on a reception screen, or in a building where the connection is unreliable.
Does moving the tour to a different address break it?: No. The links inside the folder are relative, so the tour works wherever the folder is put, as long as the structure inside it is unchanged. What does break are links other people have already made to the old address, so leave a redirect from the old address to the new one rather than deleting the old location.
Can I put the tour behind a password?: Yes. Because it is ordinary static hosting, any access control your host offers applies to it: password protection on the directory, or a section of your site that already requires a login. Nothing inside the tour has to be changed for this, and nothing about it has to be re-built.
Will you host it for me instead?: Yes. Hosting on our own subdomain is €5 per GB of storage a month if you want it, and it changes nothing about ownership — you are handed the same folder either way and can move it whenever you like. Every tour in our published work runs on our subdomain, because that is what those clients chose; the files are theirs regardless.