A Year in Review 2025

Every year I like to sit down and make a blog post looking back at the past year, and what we’ve achieved here at Kinetic. Looking back, 2025 has been one hell of a year.

User Growth

2025 has been so crazy for us in terms of user growth, I think our brains are still lagging behind and haven’t fully accepted yet what’s happened this year. Our goal was to double our client base, we shot past that goal back in February, and have grown by over 441%.

At the start of the year, we had under 2,000 total servers on our network. We now have more than 11,000 servers just for Minecraft.

Thank you so much for putting your trust in Kinetic this year and ordering from us. The hosting space is a very crowded market, and I’m genuinely grateful that you opted to order with us.

I’m very proud of the growth we’ve had this year, and the way we’ve been able to scale. Our goal was to hit this kind of size in 2027, so we’ve had to upgrade and expand a lot of our services and systems this year to keep up with that growth. Also, a big thanks to our data centre partners, they’ve been a huge help in making sure we stayed stocked all year.

Company Growth

With the client growth, we’ve also been able to grow our team. Bringing on an in-house graphic designer, starting our marketing team and our game integrations team, expanding our accounting side, along with growing our support team.

I’ve met some amazing new people this year, and it’s a pleasure to work with such a talented and passionate team.

We’ve also had the pleasure of starting to work with some amazing game studios. For obvious reasons I can’t talk more about this yet, but there are some very cool games coming down the line. It’s been great working with these studios, whether that’s through a hosting partnership or just helping them run and host their own servers.

New Packages

I think a lot of things this year led to our big growth, but nothing more than our new packages.

If you don’t know, at the start of the year we had over 50 package types, spread across Budget, Performance, and Impact plans. There was a lot of choice and a lot of options, but we had many people confused about what to get, or leaving the site due to the overwhelming number of options.

For the past few years we’d had an idea in our heads to slim down our package line and offer fewer, clearer packages. However, there was a bit of a risk. What we had at that moment had worked for us so far, what if we changed how we sold servers and it wasn’t popular, and sales took a nose dive?

At the start of this year we managed to secure some new deals on hardware, meaning our overall costs were lower. That, teamed with some new tech to get the most out of every system (read more about it here), meant it was costing us less to run a node. That finally gave us room to remove smaller packages and reduce our lineup.

As a test, in September we launched our SGP packages to see how popular they’d be. At first we only offered a 16 GB and an 8 GB package. We’ve since grown this to include 4 GB, 20 GB, 24 GB, and 32 GB options based on feedback. Even with the extra four packages, our lineup is still far simpler than the 50+ we had before.

The effect of the simpler lineup and lower pricing was immediate. Our monthly growth more than doubled in September, then doubled again in October, with our monthly active client count still growing.

This was a bit of a risk, but it’s paid off. I’m really glad that, with the support of our team, I pulled the trigger on this change.

Partner Program

This year we’ve added some amazing partners and expanded our partner program to now include over 400 partners. We also worked on increasing our payout percentage and have given out three times more servers this year than last. The last time I checked our payouts, we’d paid out close to $300,000 USD to partners this year.

Thank you to everyone who’s joined the partner program, and a special thanks to those who turned down bigger offers from other hosts to support Kinetic. Due to our low prices, we can’t splash cash the same way some providers can, so we’re incredibly grateful to see people supporting us anyway.

It’s also been cool chatting with all our partners in our Discord server. Our Discord as a whole is starting to feel like a small community, and that’s not something you see with a lot of hosts.

New Website

This year we did a rebrand of Kinetic, out with the blue, in with the purple, all based on feedback from last year’s feedback form. With this came a full site rework.

Along with the new site, we also launched a new blog and a new knowledgebase. This was a big rebuild, as it also fully redid the backend of the site to make it easier to add new posts and articles.

That’s paid off. We’ve added hundreds of new articles to the knowledgebase this year and massively expanded support for other games.

New Panel

This year we shipped a load of new features for our panel:

Storage Manager
Workspaces
World Installer
World Manager
Crash Helper
Recycle Bin
Chat Console
Instances
Modpack Importer
Datapack Installer
Quick Step
Network Test Tool
Colour Tags
Mod Manager
Client Mod Scan
NBT Editor
3D Chunk View

That’s just new features - we also upgraded:

Mod Installer
Plugin Installer
Change Game Tool
Backup Manager
Player Manager
Sub-Users
Split Tool

And I’ve probably forgotten some here.

Panel 6 was the biggest update we’ve ever done. It wasn’t just new features and a new UI, it was also a big behind-the-scenes update that cleared a lot of tech debt and should allow us to move even faster going forward (yes, somehow faster).

Mistakes of the Year

While this year has had some massive milestones, I do think we made a few mistakes.

The first was the original, scrapped Panel 6.

Work on the original Panel 6 started back in January. Over the years, the codebase for Panel 5, especially on the frontend, had become messy, so the plan was to fully rebuild the frontend from the ground up.

While good progress was made, we still needed to keep adding new features to Panel 5. That meant by the time one feature was added to Panel 6, two more had already landed in Panel 5. The rebuild quickly fell behind.

Why not just stop adding features to Panel 5 while working on 6? It’s a solid idea, but not really how we work. One, it would impact clients by holding features back. Two, it would slow down support. Most features are added based on what we see a lot of tickets for, for example, storage-related tickets led directly to the Storage Manager. Working this way keeps ticket volume lower, which lets us keep the support team smaller and costs down.

After our growth spike in September, it became clear we needed bigger features in Panel 5 quickly. Rather than fighting the messy codebase, I started clearing tech debt instead. Eventually Panel 5 reached a good enough state that the full rebuild became unnecessary.

We decided to scrap the full rewrite and instead upgrade Panel 5’s codebase as part of the Panel 6 update. Once the tech debt was cleared, everything I’d wanted to add this year could finally land, which is why Panel 6 ended up being so big.

That did mean the framework upgrades, new UI, and all the features were done in about two months. That was a lot of long days. In hindsight, pulling focus to the original rebuild was a mistake. While everything did ship, it would have been better spread across the year rather than crammed into such a short timeframe.

The only silver lining is that, as the only frontend dev, the impact of that decision mostly landed on me.

The Size of Panel 6

With the chains lifted from the old codebase, feature after feature was added to Panel 6. What started as a fairly small update quickly became the biggest update we’d ever planned.

Pushing an update with this many changes, to the number of clients we now have, was honestly a bit stressful. We tested the panel before launch, but new things always show up once something goes live.

Luckily, apart from a few bugs here and there, it was a smooth update. Moving forward, for our teams sanity, we’ll aim to ship smaller updates more often rather than huge releases like this.

Looking Forward

2026 is shaping up to be an interesting year. It’s already starting with a bit of a bang thanks to the Hytale launch, which we plan to support day one and continue supporting going forward.

The big one is RAM. You might have seen that RAM prices, driven by AI demand, have shot up, we’ve seen increases of over 500%. This doesn’t just affect consumer RAM, but data centres as well. It’s become tricky for both us and our data centre partners to get hold of RAM, and when we can, it’s expensive.

This means stocking new systems has become difficult. New hardware now costs us nearly three times what it did before, and that’s if we can get it at all. Right now we’re absorbing those costs, and it’s mainly impacting smaller regions. Luckily, for our most popular locations we still have plenty of stock to cover growth for the next few months.

Once that stock runs out, and if prices stay high, we may need to look at adjusting prices. We’ll do everything we can before that happens, and if it does, it would only affect new orders, not existing clients, with notice given in advance.

Not something we need to worry about immediately, but something we need to be prepared for.

That’s All

Anyway, that’s the 2025 review.

Once again, thank you to everyone who ordered a server this year, a huge thanks to the amazing Kinetic Hosting team, and thank you to all our partners and community members. You’ve all made 2025 a year I won’t forget.

Here’s to 2026. I guess you’ll hear from me again in our next transparency report in March.

Thanks all,
Chris
CEO @ Kinetic Hosting