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.
LEA (LowEndAdmin) is the original founder of LowEndBox and the visionary who gave rise to an entire movement around minimalist, efficient hosting. In 2008, LEA launched LowEndBox with a simple but powerful idea: that it was possible to run meaningful applications, web servers, VPNs, mail servers, and more – on small, low-cost virtual machines with minimal resources.
At a time when most infrastructure discussions were dominated by high-end servers and enterprise platforms, LEA championed the opposite approach: lightweight Linux distros, self-managed servers, open source software, and thoughtful optimization. This philosophy gave birth to the term “Low End Box”, which would come to define a new genre of hosting tailored to developers, tinkerers, and budget-conscious users around the world.
Through LowEndBox and its companion forum, LowEndTalk, LEA built the foundation for what would become one of the most active and enduring communities in the hosting world, prioritizing knowledge-sharing, transparency, and accessibility.
After several years of nurturing the site and community, LEA stepped away from active involvement, passing the torch to a new generation of admins, contributors, and moderators. Today, LEA remains a respected figure in the LowEnd ecosystem, credited with launching a platform and philosophy that continues to influence thousands of infrastructure providers and users globally.
LowEndBox’s legacy, and its thriving community, is a direct result of LEA’s original vision.
Cool, I do look at the website quite often. P.S. these days it comes up with a grey box saying the SSL certificate, or whatever, has expired k- k- k- k-
P.P.S. I did look into your tutorial on certbot which was good value. My sites are still all just http:// as there’s no personal data involved. Must sort that sometime….