TL;DR – We shipped lots of great stuff, customer support is stronger than ever, marketing stalled, and George now owns the company.
This is my eleventh year in review post since I started writing them: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024.
Team
This past year was a continuation of our 2024 strategy of staying lean and focusing on things that work.
We welcomed a talented Laravel developer, Vincent, to the team in March, but had to say goodbye to James just a couple of weeks later. James had to move back to the United States from Canada and was unfortunately no longer eligible for the government program that we take advantage of. His excellent work and great sense of humour will be missed (see the recommendation I left on his LinkedIn profile).
It has been wonderful to see Vincent ramp up as quickly as he has and ship lots of great stuff over the past eight months. He has been an excellent addition to the team and I couldn’t be happier with his contributions.
Our dev team of George, James/Vincent, and Lewis cranked through our roadmap in 2025 and I was very happy with their work and what we shipped (see the Product section below). I’ve been grateful to have a superb team of talented folks to work with.
Our support team of Jaime and Andre did an excellent job in 2025 as well, frequently praised by customers who were surprised by their helpfulness and how far they are willing to go to resolve issues. Customer support has been a weakness of ours in the past, so it’s such a relief to have talented, dependable folks helping customers over the past couple of years.
Jaime and Andre also started working more closely with the dev team this year. Andre helping test features before and after they’re shipped. And Jaime has been researching configuration changes to our server software (e.g. Nginx), testing them, and providing developers with implementation instructions. He has also been updating our Install WordPress on Ubuntu guide. Both Andre and Jaime have been a huge help to the developers, saving them loads of time.
Currently there are no plans to hire in the next 12 months.
Product
I’m very proud of what our tiny team shipped in 2025.
Probably the biggest release of the year was the SpinupWP Assistant. Way back in 2017, when we started SpinupWP, I had a vision of what server management could be like with good software and this felt like the realization of that vision. It felt great to get it shipped. We followed this up with the ability to remove outdated versions of PHP from the server, bringing the Assistant closer to being able to do all maintenance tasks. It’s really just the ability to run apt upgrade that’s left.
Another big release was the recent page cache improvements, allowing the page to still be cached and served from the cache when specific query strings are present. This was long overdue and was celebrated in the comments on the community post.
Another long time thorn in the side of our customers has been the server crons all running at the same time and spiking the CPU. Our new cron system took care of that and has been working great.
We started supporting quite a few services as backup storage providers: Vultr, Hetzner, Cloudflare R2, and SFTP.
We also stayed on top of the latest software, shipping PHP 8.4 early in the year and then PHP 8.5 just a few weeks ago. We also started offering MySQL 8.4 for new servers.
Here’s the complete list of what we shipped in 2025:
- SpinupWP Assistant
- Assistant: Remove old PHP version from server
- Allow caching of URLs with a query string
- Copy and paste custom HTTPS certificates
- PHP-FPM pool config now copied between PHP versions
- Improved speed of service actions and page cache actions
- Backup storage providers:
- Enable/disable site cron
- Find & replace option when cloning a site
- API:
- PHP 8.4 and PHP 8.5
- MySQL 8.4
Technically, we also shipped something that we’ve been working on for a long time. It’s live, in production, and running, but no customers have access to it yet. I’m talking about the new dashboard. We plan to enable it for select customers this month, then once we’re confident we’ve found all the major issues, we’ll be opening it up to all customers. It’s going to be a massive improvement for those who have 10+ servers and sites.
We also have three more big projects that are very close to the finish line and will be shipping early this year. The first is a new object cache system. We’ve completely revamped our Redis configuration to greatly improve reliability issues that have plagued customers in the past. It also enhances the security isolation between sites sharing a server.
The second large project is SpinupWP subdomains. We’ve reworked the new site creation flow, removing HTTPS options and the need to update your DNS. Instead, we generate a complementary SpinupWP subdomain (e.g. kfh4mfvj34d.xyz.spinupwp.site) and you can enable HTTPS after the site is created if you wish. This will greatly simplify and speed up the site creation process. No more wrestling with DNS issues when trying to quickly create a site.
The third major project that’s close is the PHP settings project. Workers, Upload Max File Size, Post Max Size, Memory Limit, etc. You’ll be able to change all the PHP settings you commonly have to tweak right from the site dashboard.
Exciting stuff lined up for early 2026!
For later in the year, we’re planning to work on Cloudflare DNS integration, HTTP/3 support, the ability to define default settings for new servers and sites, and the Assistant’s ability to run non-security server software updates.
Customer Support
As I mentioned above, our customer support has never been stronger. Jaime and Andre have been doing an incredible job helping customers, taking feedback, distilling it, and relaying it to the team for improvements to the product. They also started reviewing each other’s work and offering feedback in an effort to help each other improve. Exactly what’s needed to keep raising the bar.
In the past, I’ve mentioned adding to our support team to cover more of the clock, and I still think that will be great in the future, but it’s not planned for 2026.
Marketing
I did quite a bit of marketing work in the second half of 2024 and as it was paying off going into 2025, I was energized to do more. I was looking forward to working on the Install WordPress on Ubuntu guide, the VPS Control Panel Comparison Tool, and tidying up existing content. Unfortunately, none of that happened. I did hardly anything on the marketing front in 2025.
Late in the year, I finally realized that I wasn’t going to do anything myself, so I asked Jaime to do some updates to the Install WordPress on Ubuntu guide. I’m very happy to say that the guide has never been in better shape. Lots of very nice updates. Jaime also added a number of new docs and updated existing ones.
Lewis also took it upon himself to refresh parts of our site and keep things up-to-date, so the site is also in good shape. There’s still lots that needs to be done though. Articles need updating and some need to be purged. The VPS Control Panel Comparison Tool needs to be updated and more control panels added.
Given that we haven’t done much marketing, it probably comes as no surprise that traffic is down 29%, free trials are down 20%, and new subscribers are down 26% compared to 2024. I wish it were as simple as just lack of effort. In the good ‘ol days, we could just get to work and turn things around. But we’re in the AI era now.
Many of my entrepreneur friends whose businesses depend on SEO are all seeing similar declines despite their continued marketing efforts. AI is really throwing a wrench in the gears and it seems no one knows how to turn things around. The whole situation has been bothering me so much that I wrote an article about it: No Clicks, No Content: The Unsustainable Future of AI Search.
At the moment, the best idea seems to be to just operate as we have before: publish great content and hope that Google rewards us for it. Hopefully it works.
At this point, you may be wondering, what happened? Why did I do so little marketing in 2025?
Passing the Baton
In January, my priorities shifted. I started to prioritize my health, my family, my friends, and my community. I did the bare minimum for SpinupWP. I ran the weekly meeting and made sure the teams had what they needed, but marketing just wasn’t a priority.
About mid year, I realized that my commitment to the company wasn’t fair to the team or our customers. They deserved better. It was time for a change. SpinupWP needed a new owner.
I started talking to potential buyers in my network and let George and Lewis know that I was looking for a new owner for the company. To my surprise, George was interested and in just a few weeks we worked out a way he could buy the company. We closed the deal on October 31st and George has been the new owner of SpinupWP ever since. Everything has been transitioned over to him at this point and my role is now as an advisor.
I couldn’t be happier about this. I was only selling SpinupWP to someone who would do right by the team and the customers and George fits this mold perfectly. He has been a senior developer on the team for 5 years and knows all the ins and outs of the app and the company. Plus he has a world-class team behind him. SpinupWP is in great hands and I’m confident it will thrive going forward.
Thanks
I’d like to thank my team for all the awesome work they’ve done not just in the past year, but since 2017. I’m very proud of SpinupWP. We’ve built a great product together, I’m a huge fan, and I can’t wait to see what ships next.
It has been my pleasure working with the fine folks at SpinupWP these past 8 years and I wish George, Lewis, Andre, Vincent, and Jaime the best of luck going forward.
Here’s to the SpinupWP team and here’s to 2026! 🎉
