Posted: 2026-10-13
Slow Servers is currently a one man show. This isn't ideal for me and it isn't ideal for my customers if anything happens to me. It's also burning money every month as it's not profitable.
Having a family, I have to be realistic about what's worth my time. If I can provide better for my family in another line of work, I ought to consider it. Or if I can cut something from my plate and be more present with my family, that also has value.
Thus, I've decided to go until 2030 unless I have a large enough userbase. Rather than vanish out of the blue, I would rather let you know what my exit plan is, upfront.
If by 2030 it's too small of an operation, I'll disable signups and give people plenty of notice so they have time to migrate elsewhere.
But if by 2030 it can be a primary source of income for my family, I will absolutely continue it.
I knew it was a gamble from the start, and I'm financing this myself. As I write this, I've probably spent close to $10,000 on it and haven't made anything for my time. Each month I burn close to $500 per month in expenses, so that increases all the time. Though each signup I have does slowly turn towards profitability. I say this to help explain my reasoning.
Anyway, thank you for reading!
As some of you know, I also run SporeStack, which focuses on reselling for cryptocurrency.
One of my providers is one that is whitelabeled as "SporeStack EU." It offered lower prices for pretty decent servers. It turned out to not be as reliable as Vultr and DigitalOcean, which was concerning, but still seemed fine for most. However, when I stopped hearing from my one point of contact at the company, I became quite concerned. Things still seem to run, but no response in tickets led me to no longer allow new servers there and I posted a notice urging users to move any server of importance off of SporeStack EU. Ultimately, I don't know what happened, but the provider was a pretty small one. Possibly a one-man-show.
This experience, showing poor judgement on my part to add a questionable host, did bring up a question within myself about me being a one-man-show (and thus a single point of failure) for both SporeStack and Slow Servers.
Ideally, Slow Servers would have employees and redundancy built-in. If anything happened to any one of us, we could continue hosting. As well, it could run and pay for my family if something happened to me.
Now that may not be realistic any time soon, but that would be the ideal situation. At the moment, it's a lot more possible for someone to run SporeStack and pay the rest to my family, if something happened to me.
Today, I raised prices to a level I'll be more likely to sustain after 2030. However, I am not raising anyone's existing prices. You can renew at the same price you've already paid for.
I also recently eliminated the 768MB plans because they don't allow for good host utilization with the spread of plans purchased. Again, if you have them, you may keep it for as long as you please.
I realize there are many cheaper hosts out there. Some of them are cheap and good, but for many you have AI or next to nonexistent support. I would rather charge extra and provide extra, than aim for razor thin margins. If this is going to be a sustainable business, sadly, this is a start in that direction if new users are comfortable with these prices.
I do plan on offering monthly billing sometime soon.