In one of our earlier posts, we talked about the fun part: Black Friday, megathread madness, and record-breaking traffic numbers that pushed LowEndTalk’s servers to their absolute limits. For example, look at the surge of interest on RackNerd’s LowEndTalk Black Friday thread – RackNerd achieved over 4.2 Million views on their LowEndTalk thread alone!

But the celebration only makes sense if you understand the backdrop behind it. Because 2025 wasn’t a normal year for hosting. It wasn’t even a difficult year. It was a structural pivot point for the entire industry, the kind of year you’re still talking about 5 years later. You thought the chip shortage during COVID was something? That was a warm-up act. What’s happening now in the hardware market is a long-term, multi-year hardware squeeze that will reshape hosting, pricing, and business models all the way through 2028 and possibly beyond. And the LowEndTalk community has been watching it unfold in real time.

Why 2025 Became “The Trade War”

If the hosting world had a weather report, 2025 would be categorized somewhere between “incoming storm system” and “you might want to reinforce the roof.” Prices jumped across the entire hardware stack. Supply tightened. Predictability evaporated. Every quarter seemed to contradict the previous one. RAM took the brunt of it. For the first time in years, hosts openly discussed the possibility that RAM inflation might force VPS prices upward – something that used to be unthinkable for a market built on ever-improving price-to-spec ratios. That discussion played out loudly in a popular LET thread: “How Will Ram Price Inflation Affect Hosting Provider Prices“.

Then came CPUs. AMD adjusted pricing upward earlier this year, which wouldn’t normally be catastrophic, except the timing was terrible – landing right as hosting providers were finalizing their Black Friday hardware builds. Cue another heated thread: AMD to Increase CPU Pricing After Midnight Today.

But the clearest warning came from someone who’s seen every wave of this industry: OVHcloud founder and CEO, Octave Klaba. In a separate discussion, he predicted a 5-10% rise in cloud pricing heading into 2026, driven largely by DRAM and NVMe costs climbing faster than anyone forecasted. When the CEO of a large provider publicly says “prices will go up next year,” that’s not speculation – that’s a certainty.

When AI Becomes the Only Customer That Matters

At the heart of the 2025 chaos is memory. DRAM, HBM, NAND, NVMe – every flavor of it. The AI boom completely distorted the supply chain. Manufacturers redirected enormous portions of their capacity toward high-bandwidth memory needed by AI accelerators, GPUs, inference clusters, and model-training farms. Hyperscalers signed multi-year contracts. Entire production lines were reorganized. When that happens, smaller buyers, like hosting companies, don’t get the leftovers. They get whatever isn’t pre-committed, which usually amounts to “not much.” And then came one of the clearest symbols of the shift: Micron shutting down the Crucial consumer brand after 29 years. A name practically synonymous with safe, reliable, reasonably priced RAM and SSDs simply vanished from the general market, absorbed into the gravitational pull of AI economics. Elsewhere in the news cycle, a widely circulated story suggested that Samsung’s own memory division was reluctant to sign long-term RAM supply contracts with Samsung’s own mobile division because selling into the open market was simply more profitable. In other words, Samsung is refusing to sell to… you guessed it, Samsung. 

SSD’s and NVMe Isn’t Immune Either

Storage saw its own price swings. Storage demand, particularly for enterprise-grade, high-endurance drives exploded. Training larger AI models requires enormous storage throughput, and manufacturers naturally favor long-term enterprise contracts with predictable volume. For hosting providers used to purchasing pallets of storage devices (i.e. SSD or NVMe) at stable prices, 2025 wasn’t pleasant. Availability slipped. Costs crept upward. Lead times stretched. 

CPU Costs Quietly Joined the Party

CPUs weren’t hit as violently as RAM, but the increases were noticeable and poorly timed. High-core-count EPYC parts became more expensive to source, and some configurations saw meaningful upticks just as providers were planning new nodes. Even those who rely on Intel saw less price movement but more volatility in availability. 2025 wasn’t the year of CPU shortages – but it was the year CPUs stopped being the stable input they used to be.

The Long-Term Outlook: Buckle Up

Most analysts don’t think this hardware storm is going to blow over quickly. Some predict stabilization in 2028. Others say 2029 and beyond. AI demand is still accelerating. HBM production is still constrained. Traditional DRAM output isn’t rising fast enough. And as hyperscalers continue building multi-billion-dollar training clusters, they will always get priority. Hosting companies? They’re somewhere farther back in the line, behind the companies training 300-billion-parameter models.

What This Means for Hosting Providers

This is where things get interesting. In a market where hardware is harder to acquire, more expensive, and less predictable, providers are going to need to rethink their value proposition. You can’t rely on “lowest price wins” when the cost of the underlying components no longer supports that model. And you can’t count on specs alone selling a plan if customers intuitively understand that hardware inflation is real.

Creativity Will Become a Competitive Advantage

This is where the next few years will be defined. Providers will need to get more creative – not just technically, but operationally and strategically. Customers will look for more than raw specs. They’ll look for ecosystem value. Service value. Support value. Integrations. Extras. Convenience. And frankly, the hosts who adapt will survive. The ones who don’t may simply fade out.

A good early example of this shift is something we’re already seeing: certain providers beginning to bundle genuinely valuable extras that cost real money, but are offered free to their customers as a differentiator. One of the clearest cases this year came from RackNerd, which provides a free Clientexec licenses to any customer who requests one – regardless of whether they’re on a shared hosting plan, a reseller account, a VPS, or a dedicated server. For context, a Clientexec license normally runs about $16.95 per month. Meanwhile, RackNerd currently has VPS plans on their Black Friday page for as low as $10.60 per year, which you can actually still order now by clicking here. 

Not many providers offer a value-add like that. In this case, the free Clientexec license is worth more than the cost of the hosting service from RackNerd itself, so you, as a customer, save and win both ways. In a year where hardware constraints are squeezing margins everywhere, seeing a provider offer that level of value is a strong indicator of where the industry is headed: hosts will need to deliver more than raw specs – they’ll need to deliver an ecosystem, and better overall value.

The New Era of Hosting Begins

2025 will be remembered as the year everything changed. Hardware got expensive. Supply collapsed under AI demand. Consumer-focused brands disappeared. CPU pricing shifted. Storage tightened. And hosting providers had to think harder about inventory, forecasting, and how to stand out in a crowded market undergoing real stress. 

But it was also the year the community showed that even a hardware storm can’t kill the LowEnd spirit. For example, during this Black Friday, deals still happened, new services launched by numerous providers, and overall traffic broke records. And certain providers managed to thrive in one of the tightest hardware climates in recent memory – not by luck, but by preparation, adaptability, and a willingness to offer value in unconventional ways. If this was truly the “Trade War,” then the battle lines are clear: the next few years will favor the providers who innovate, who plan ahead, and who understand that the future of hosting isn’t just about hardware – it’s about value. And judging by the momentum we saw this Black Friday, the providers that are here for the long haul are already positioning themselves well for whatever comes next, while finding ways to deliver excellent value and service to its end-users. 

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.