@zed on LowEndTalk made a joke about LowEndTalk:

Well yes, yes we do.

LowEndBox was founded on February 1, 2008.  But LowEndTalk didn’t come along until 17 months later, on July 12, 2010.  The post announcing it was December 15, 2008.  That was when the forum ran on bbpress, on the LowEndBox WordPress instance itself.

I am a bit surprised that there are actually 40-50 visitors to this small website, and many have emailed me the low end stuff that they have found. I think a good way to build the community (yes, due to financial crisis and imminent recession, there’s actually a community for running low-end servers) would be setting up a forum where budget-conscious admins can talk about low end stuff.

So here we have it. Low End Box Forums aka LowEndTalk.

Currently running barebone bbPress, which I haven’t yet bothered to set up a theme for it. Dump stuff there, and let’s get the talk going.

In July 2010, LEB was running as follows:

• 80MB Xen VPS in Softlayer/Dallas since a month ago (it’s a courtesy testing VPS so free for me, thanks to Joe @ QuickWeb)
• 27k visitors/month and 92k page views/month according to Google Analytics
• Only use ~1GB of disk space & 20GB/month of data.

Seemed to hold up well when LowEndBox was featured on HackerNews.  By the way, @dmmcintyre3, who ran the freevps.us forum, commented “My 128MB VPS is $3 a month and runs my MyBB forum great.”

It was a different time 😀

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, 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, raindog308 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, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, 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.