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.
This smells a bit dodgy to me. Benefit of the doubt says that Mini was bought out by another crowd who decided to use the existing infrastructure, however this *is* the budget VPS market…
Minivds didn’t have such advanced plans – 768mb for $44.
That suggests a rebranding, which is logical as 768 isn’t exactly mini, however I’d wait a while to see if they aren’t a fly-by-night.
AFAIK MiniVDS was a subsidiary of FirstVDS.ru which is Russian low-end VPS provider and in it’s turn is a subsidiary of ISP System (http://ispsystem.com/en/). Which is also Russian by the way.
FirstVDS is pretty well known here. It’s 7 years old. It offers FreeBSD jail boxes and OpenVZ ones. I run some of my sites on it (OpenVZ) and I’m quite satisfied.
NAC is NJ, not NY IIRC
Thanks @Eugene. I think these companies are probably all related.