Every November, our sister forum, LowEndTalk, erupts into that familiar ritual: the Black Friday MegaThread. It starts with a quiet spark, a handful of pre-BF warmups, and then, it detonates into an annual tradition in which servers, moderators, and caffeine supplies are all pushed to the limit.

This year’s Black Friday megathread on LET was named: “2025 Black Friday / Cyber Monday: FLASH SALE & MEGATHREAD – The Trade War”, and it truly lived up to its name.

We’re currently at ~2.4 million views on the thread and more than 21k comments, and as anyone who has followed Black Friday threads knows, the traffic keeps coming for weeks afterward. Massive thanks to LET Administrator @FAT32 for coordinating another year of this logistical circus – keeping the custom BF deal-ingest system running, monitoring resources, and moderating around the clock.

This was also the year that the community’s voted top provider, RackNerd, broke every record in LowEndTalk’s history.

Their Black Friday post didn’t simply outperform – it blew away every BF provider post ever recorded on the LowEndTalk platform.

RackNerd even broke their own record. And they now hold the all-time LET crown, with a staggering 4.2 million views.

To put that in perspective: a decade ago, entire years of LET traffic didn’t reach that number. Whatever they’re doing, it’s working – and clearly, people are paying attention.

Why 2025 Felt Like a “Trade War”

@FAT32 didn’t choose that subtitle lightly. If the hosting world had a weather report, 2025 would be classified as severe turbulence.

The global hardware environment has been hostile to say the least. Prices have jumped, supply has tightened, and the usual predictable cycles of RAM, NVMe, and CPU costs have gone out the window.

The LET community has been discussing the situation in depth, across numerous threads – RAM pricing, CPU supply, NVMe shortages, and more, but we’ll dive deeper into the component-pricing chaos in one of our upcoming LEB posts.

Suffice it to say: this was not an easy year for providers.

And Yet… Black Friday Still Happened

What makes 2025 extraordinary is that amid all this chaos – the pricing swings, the shortages, the supply-chain acrobatics, providers still found ways to show up.

RackNerd in particular, demonstrated a level of resilience that stood out. While many providers were pulling back or warning about limited stock, RackNerd expanded. New deals, new datacenter locations, refreshed hardware offerings, and community giveaways that seemed to run nonstop. It wasn’t the strategy of a company hunkering down – it was the strategy of one doubling down.

And yes, as of the time you’re reading this, RackNerd’s Black Friday deals remain live and available to latecomers who missed the initial rush:

https://racknerd.com/BlackFriday

Given everything going on in the industry, that’s no small feat. Pricing stability in 2025 is starting to feel like spotting a unicorn.

A Community That Keeps Showing Up

One reason these Black Friday events remain as big as they are is simple: the LowEndTalk community is bigger, louder, and more engaged than ever.

The numbers say it outright. Compare the early days with the present and the growth is unmistakable. A healthier platform, more active stewardship, more users, more providers, and far more energy behind these annual events.

If you haven’t visited LET lately, it’s worth stopping by. December is always full of holiday giveaways, follow-up reviews, benchmarks, deal postmortems, and the occasional meltdown when someone tries to run Docker + Kubernetes + Plex + a mail server on a $10/year VPS.

Looking Back at 2025

This year will be remembered as a turning point. Hardware inflation tore through assumptions that had held for more than fifteen years. For better or for worse, the old rule of “every year, you get more specs for less money” has finally buckled under pressure from AI hyperscalers, vanishing consumer-focused SSD/RAM brands, and CPU pricing moving upward for the first time in recent memory.

And yet, despite all the headwinds, the LowEnd ecosystem didn’t shrink. It doubled down.

The community showed up.
The megathread exploded.
And RackNerd broke the all-time view record.

If this was The Trade War, then 2025 proved that the LowEnd world still knows how to fight back (and even break a few records along the way).

P.S. RackNerd’s Black Friday 2025 thread on LowEndTalk is still active here (including giveaways).  And the MegaThread is still growing!

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.