Kinetic Hosting Is 6 Years Old

Today is July 20th, which means Kinetic Hosting is now six years old!

To mark our birthday, we’ve added a special Cake Role to our Discord server. Head over there and react to the announcement to claim it.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to look back at Kinetic Hosting, where we came from, how we got here, and everything we’ve built along the way.

The Start

Let’s wind the clock all the way back to 2020. At the time, Kinetic wasn’t a hosting company at all. We were a Minecraft network.

Founded in 2017, the Kinetic Network created modpacks such as Kinetic, Mythic, Colony, Beyond, and Infinity. This was back when Technic was one of the main modpack platforms. For those who ask sometimes in our discord, yep, we are the same Kinetic :D

Alongside these modpacks, we also ran public servers. Over the years, the Kinetic Network grew fairly well, with thousands of players joining our servers every day and more than 9,000 people in our Discord community.

There was just one small problem.

These were large, player-dense modded servers, and we couldn’t find a hosting provider that properly supported what we needed.

That isn’t to say there weren’t good hosts around, but many providers at the time charged based on player slots. The ones that didn’t often lacked the hardware or features we needed. There were tools we wanted that no host seemed to offer. Things that would make running our servers easier, such as workspaces that could be configured for each administrator, a world map where we could remove entities and blocks, or even basic NBT editors built directly into the panel.

No host ever seemed to quite tick every box.

So, we decided to do it ourselves.

We began renting our own hardware and started building the foundations of what would eventually become the Kinetic Panel.

Hosting Is Conceived

I always say that Kinetic Hosting came together in two stages.

Stage one was Kinetic Network Hosting.

This was originally just a page on the Kinetic Network website offering a small number of hosting packages. We already had our own hardware and a very basic panel, so we began offering access to it for people who played our modpacks.

You could purchase a server, install one of our modpacks with the click of a button, and start playing. However, people quickly began asking for more.

Could we offer other modpacks? Other versions of Minecraft? Other games?

So, in late 2020, we separated Kinetic Network Hosting from the Kinetic Network and formed Kinetic Hosting.

Hosting Is Born

To me, this was stage two.

This was when hosting got its own home, its own branding, and really became its own thing.

We started supporting more games, including Garry’s Mod, Minecraft Bedrock, Rust, ARK, 7 Days to Die, Valheim, and more. We created our own branding and launched a fancy new website.

However, there was still one thing we really wanted: more features. Until this point, we had been using the open-source Pterodactyl panel. It was a great foundation, but we needed features that it didn’t offer at the time.

One of the biggest was the ability to swap games, something very few hosts offered back then.

So, we began customising the Pterodactyl panel. We changed its design and started adding our own features, including tools such as player managers for Minecraft.

The Kinetic Panel

That customised panel laid the foundations for the Kinetic Panel.

Over the years, we kept building, changing, adding, and restyling that original version of Pterodactyl until it became what we have today. We officially named it the Kinetic Panel when version 1.0 launched in January 2022.

Looking back at it now, it was still very basic compared with the panel we have today, but we were incredibly excited about it at the time.

It wasn’t long before we launched Kinetic Panel 2.0. At last, we had game swapping, one of our biggest goals from the very beginning. We also added server splitting, which remains one of our most popular features today.

Now that some of the basics were in place, it was time to build more game-specific features.

Kinetic Panel 3 launched just a few months after Panel 2. It came with an entirely new interface, startup flag toggles, a basic player manager, mod installers, plugin installers, and much more.

Kinetic Panel 4

Kinetic Panel 4 might be one of the most important updates we have ever released.

Even when looking at old screenshots, you can clearly see how much of the current panel was built on top of what we created with Panel 4.

For this update, we stripped everything back to its core and rebuilt it. With Panel 3, we were still learning. Features had been added over time, parts of the code were a little messy, and maintaining everything was becoming increasingly difficult.

So, we took everything we had learned over the previous three years and rebuilt the panel from the ground up. While many things have been improved over subsequent updates, much of the work completed for Panel 4 is still present in the panel today.

You can also see the foundations of features that would come much later.

The Overview page, for example, allowed you to move components around and add or remove them. There were only around ten components available, and they couldn’t be resized, but that system eventually led to the Workspaces feature we have now.

Panel 5 and Panel 6

Unlike our previous panel versions, we continued updating Panel 4 for quite some time.

However, by August 2024, we had a huge number of features ready to release, so we decided to mark the update as Kinetic Panel 5.

There wasn’t a massive interface redesign or complete under-the-hood rebuild. Instead, it was a large collection of improvements to schedules, mod installers, modpack installers, first-time setup, and the file manager.

Panel 6 was our next enormous update.

Later in 2025, our biggest update ever landed. Panel 6 reworked huge portions of the interface and introduced Workspaces, the Crash Manager, World Manager, NBT Editor, and major under-the-hood changes that allowed us to release updates much faster.

Since Panel 6 launched, we have released 27 major panel updates this year alone.

That is 27 major updates in the space of just seven months.

For context, Panel 5 received only nine major updates across around 16 months.

The foundations created for Panel 6 allowed us to develop faster and release larger updates. Features such as the World Map, mod managers, new console, Send to Server buttons, improved mobile interface, and many of the other massive changes you have seen over the past seven months were only possible because of that work.

We Ticked the Boxes

At the beginning of this post, I spoke about the features we wished hosting providers offered when we were running the Kinetic Network.

The World Map, Workspaces, NBT Editor, and many of our other tools are exactly what we were building towards.

They were ideas and part of a vision we had six years ago.

Thanks to everyone who placed their trust in Kinetic and ordered servers from us, we have been able to turn those ideas into a reality.

We are still far from finished, though. There is so much more we want to add to Kinetic, so the panel updates will keep coming.

It Isn’t All About the Panel

I have spoken a lot about the panel, but I think that is because of how we see ourselves.

We have always viewed Kinetic as more than just a hosting company. In many ways, we see ourselves as a software company.

What you are really buying from us is access to the Kinetic Panel. We aim to provide the hardware as close to cost as possible.

That does not mean hardware takes a back seat.

When we first started, Intel Xeon E-2288G processors were our main offering. They are still powerful CPUs, but as hardware improved, we continued upgrading. We first introduced Ryzen 7 5800X systems, followed by Ryzen 9 7950X systems, and now Ryzen 9 9950X systems.

Over the years, we have continually upgraded our hardware to offer the most powerful options available in each location.

Another positive step was making more of our infrastructure visible.

While it is not uncommon for smaller hosting providers to display node statistics, most larger hosts keep them private. We wanted customers to always be able to see how much RAM, storage, and CPU their server was using. This helps demonstrate that we are not overloading our systems.

You can view our live node statistics here: https://stats.kinetichosting.com

The other step was introducing our transparency reports.

It is completely understandable to look at Kinetic, compare us with other providers, and ask how our pricing is sustainable.

Our transparency reports provide a deeper look into how we operate. Moving forward, I want to include even more hard statistics in these reports, allowing you to properly dig into how Kinetic works behind the scenes.

The Partnership Program

One of the first people we hired at Kinetic was a Partnership Manager, Fresh.

That was before either myself or Penguin was even being paid.

We knew that working with other mod and modpack creators could help Kinetic grow, especially because our own modpacks were how we had originally started promoting our hosting.

Hosting partnership programmes are commonplace now, but in 2022, they were much less developed. Often, you would receive a banner to place on your website and then never hear from the host again.

We wanted to do things differently.

We offered high payouts, free servers, graphics, a community Discord where partners could talk, and direct help getting mods and modpacks working properly on servers.

Partnership programmes like this are common now. While I won’t claim we were the first, we were certainly one of the earlier hosts to offer partners something more meaningful.

Our partners have given so much back in return.

They have not only introduced new people to Kinetic, but have also become the heart of our community.

Kinetic would not be where it is today without the amazing partners we have worked with.

We know that some of you have turned down much larger offers from bigger hosts to remain with Kinetic, and we could not be more grateful to every one of you.

Simple Game Packages

Another important decision came last year.

Before then, we offered Budget, Performance, and Impact packages.

Budget packages used older hardware, Performance packages used mid-range hardware, and Impact packages used our newest, cutting-edge systems.

Each speed tier had options ranging from 1 GB to 64 GB of RAM, which meant we had a total of 162 different packages.

When we looked at the traffic data for our website, we noticed that people would land on the page, become overwhelmed by the number of options, and leave.

That was completely fair.

Who really knows what an “Impact” package means without reading through everything?

So, we replaced these plans with our Simple Game Packages.

We reduced everything down to one main package type, removed the older Budget hardware, and rolled our Impact hardware into our standard offering.

While the range has grown slightly as we have added more options, we now offer only 12 main packages, with the 8 GB and 12 GB plans being our most popular.

Nice and simple.

Budget packages eventually returned in a new form as our Grandma Sherman Deals. However, keeping those on their own page means our primary offering remains straightforward and easy to understand.

The Rise of Sherman

Sherman has always been important to Kinetic.

He originally appeared as a collectable on the Kinetic Network way back in 2018.

The community quickly adopted him, creating their own versions and using them as profile pictures on Discord. The staff did the same.

Because many of the founding members of Kinetic Hosting came from the Kinetic Network, the Shermans came with us.

Just like on the Network, we began hiding different versions of Sherman around the Kinetic Hosting website.

It has been amazing to see people here adopt Sherman too, searching for him around the website and using him as their profile picture.

It might seem like a small thing, but Sherman has helped make the Kinetic Discord feel like a real community.

Growth

When Kinetic Hosting became its own company, we created something we called the Shark Strategy.

The idea was to swim quietly beneath the surface until Kinetic was in a position we were happy with. Then, once everything was ready, we would pop our heads above the water and push hard for growth.

We still wanted the company to grow, but not too quickly. Our original target was to double in size every year. That might sound ambitious, but this was set when we had only sold a few hundred servers. The problem was that five years later, we still hadn’t popped our heads above the water.

When you are developing something yourself, it never feels quite good enough. We would say we would begin marketing after Panel 3. Then it became after the new website. Then after Panel 4. There was always one more thing we wanted to finish first.

By “popping up,” I mean properly investing in advertising instead of relying almost entirely on partnerships and word of mouth.

Last year, we were forced out of that mindset because it turned out you all had other ideas. Even without us pushing heavily on marketing, word of mouth and several of our modpack partners performing incredibly well caused our growth to explode.

Between August and October 2025, our monthly order numbers increased fivefold, and the growth did not slow down. Our goal for the end of 2025 was to have 3,000 active servers. Not servers sold, but 3,000 servers active at one time.

Our target for the end of 2026 was 6,000 active servers. We passed 6,000 active servers in November 2025 and continued growing. That meant that, by the end of 2025, we had almost twice the number of active servers we had planned for the end of 2026, and around four times our original target for 2025.

As a small four-person team at the time, the sudden growth shook us a little, but we managed to scale without negatively affecting customers. It just required some very long days and nights. :DThis year, we have grown the team to 15 people.

That growth has also given us the confidence to finally begin marketing Kinetic more heavily, helping us grow even faster this year than we did last year. This is why we keep thanking everyone in nearly every post we make.

We started as an unknown hosting provider. Thanks to you, our partners, and everyone who has recommended Kinetic to someone else, we have managed to grow the company into something close to the vision we had back in 2020.

Thank You

There is a lot more to the story of Kinetic, but this post is already too long, so we'll leave it here. Maybe next year we'll cover more. We still have huge plans for Kinetic, the panel, our infrastructure, and our community.

Thank you to every customer, partner, staff member, and community member who has been part of the journey.

Here’s to year seven. 🎂