2025 was a wild year!  Looking back there was so many crazy things that happened.  Let’s recap!

Community News

ServerVerify was launched!

LowEndTalk turned 15!  LowEndBox hit 6,000 posts.

And Black Friday was amazing!

Community Providers

RackNerd gave away a full-sized arcade machine!  And had four other giveaways. They continued its growth trajectory.  And also expanded into Canada.

BuyVM was acquired by Cloudzy.

QuadraNet blew up.  DataIdes closed.   And so did MyW.  MxRoute’s @jar kept it alive for a while.

CharityHost was the center of some drama.  Again.  Still.  Neverending.

DediRock launched an affiliate program.

Hell froze over and ColoCrossing enabled IPv6.  And their ColoCloud platform was hacked.

Industry News

Mozilla sold out.  Mailbird gave its users the finger.  StackOverflow blew up. And Equinix Metal decided to stop giving free services to FOSS projects, many of which panicked.

Two HR SaaS companies got into a wild espionage battle.

The GPL seemed to be falling behind freer licenses.  Linux contemplated giving up uniprocessor configs. And by the way, you’re all filthy bigots according to the Linux Foundation.

Speaking of uniprocessor kernels, FreeDOS 1.4 was released.

Some enterprises had bad years.  MinIO revealed that they hate their users.  Really hate them.  And Dell looked bad when employees talked to the press.  Synology turned to the dark side.  And then turned back.  And ConfigServer closed.

Wikipedia rate-limited the UK.  And tariffs threatened to turn datacenters into Cuba.

Debian 13 “Trixie” was released.

And in an annual Groundhog Day move, WHMCS and cPanel announced price increases.

Fire and Brimstone

There was an insane wild fire in Los Angeles that caused some providers to shut down DCs.  A datacenter fire in Cairo claimed the lives of four technicians.

The Soviet Union rained titanium down from the sky.  And Russia lost the ability to rain down quite as much ordnance.

The Times We Live In

VPN usage surged due to new porn viewer registration requirements in many states.  And this trend shows no sign of stopping.

Elon Musk’s DOGE coders appeared to be confused by COBOL.  And no one seemed to like Elon Musk anyway.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame continued his demented raging.  And Ross Ulbricht was pardoned.

AI

AI spending started to cause layoffs.  Meta had some Llama drama.  And Hollywood didn’t like Shrek doing yoga.

OpenAI launched a web browser and Huckleberry Finn got a ray gun. Playing tabletop roleplaying games like D&D with AI became more popular.

AI pushed the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight and AI still couldn’t tell a joke.

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.