First and foremost, best wishes from all of us at Cloud68.co for the New Year 2025! January is usually a month full of reflections and anticipation for all the new projects surfing in our minds and meetings. Most important, it is a good time to take a moment to share what the past year has brought us and where we hope to go in the months ahead until December 2025.

Writing this post has reminded me of the value of our monthly blog updates. While these posts are helpful for tracking our progress, they don’t always capture the challenges we’ve faced and the full scale of what has been achieved so far. The good news? Despite the challenges, 2024 was a year that makes us proud to handle all the workload we’ve had the past 12 months.

As a small-by-design team, we’ve always aimed to be more like your neighborhood grocery store than the usual supermarket chain. This approach paid off in 2024, as more small and medium-sized teams, organizations, and companies chose to migrate from Big Tech to our managed hosting services, even with our limitations on the available budget when it comes to promoting what we do. Our ‘strategy’ is simple: make the migration from big tech to open source digital infrastructure as smooth as possible, keep things reliable. No marketing tricks, no thousands of Euros for online ads, no dark patterns, just qualitative managed hosting services with open source tools.

While keeping up with our daily work routine, we also soft-launched our Rise Against Big Tech (RABT) project—an awareness campaign highlighting the monopolistic practices of tech giants while advocating for software that respects your freedoms. The initial response has been encouraging, and we’re excited to build on this campaign throughout 2025.

Another milestone was the launch of the Besa project. If you haven’t been exposed to this already: the initiative aims to support open source developers by making it easier to handle their system administration needs, allowing them to focus on their work. We started engaging with potential partners in Q3 2024 and will have more updates to share as we make progress.

Community engagement and collabs in 2024

We’ve always felt at home during the various open source events and communities we’ve been engaged during the years. Last year was not different. In November, we had the privilege of attending the 2024 Nonprofit Software Development Summit in Oakland, California. This event brought together co-ops, NGOs, and individuals aligned with our values. Participants and ourselves call this ‘Value Aligned’ or Movement Alligned’ hosters. It was an inspiring week that reaffirmed our commitment to solidarity between selected open source coops, teams and small organisations. Best part of it all: we made new friends!

We also celebrated our five-year journey as a team with a retreat in Turin and participation to Linux Day 2024. This time together allowed us to reflect on our progress, map out our workflows, and lay the groundwork for exciting changes in 2025, including new service packages and Add-On services like migration assistance, integrations, and training. Some of our team members organised another work week in Florence, which was quite productive. Don’t blame us for choosing Italy all the time - blame the amazing food there.

These are moments when we truly appreciate and feel lucky to work on things we love and interact with folks that spend they time to make our internet a good place to be, in contrast with the usual VC funded startups that claim the same, but don’t mean it. During these events, we shared our know-how, made new friends and had a really good time. Thanks y’all!

What’s Next in 2025

As we have already steped into 2025, we’re carrying forward the lessons and momentum from the past year, but without the distractions and challenges we had. This means things are looking quite promising. These are only a few of our plans for this year. There are quite a lot of improvements we are working on behind the scenes obviously, but can’t share yet:

• Expanding the RABT Campaign: We aim to involve more value-aligned hosting providers in this movement, creating a collaborative effort to challenge tech oligopolies.
• Besa Project Development: Recognizing the interest this initiative has generated, we’re dedicating more resources to its growth.
• New Service Offerings: By mid-2025, we plan to launch improved service packages and “Add-On” services to better meet your needs. These enhancements will simplify the migration process and offer additional support.
• Infrastructure Upgrades: Our upcoming “Infra 1.5” project will bring significant performance improvements to your instances. This is more of an internal workflow thing, but will take lots of energy and time from some of our team members. The impact is expected to be quite positive in terms of performance and reliability though.
• Streamlined Onboarding: Since November 2024, we’ve been working on making our website more intuitive, with a focus on easier service ordering and customized packages. This aims to make it easier for you to get managed hosting and ‘Add-On’ services (see below).
• Add-On services will be announce in the next week(s) so stay tuned if you think that providing migration, integration, user support and/or training session makes it easy for small/medium organisations to migrate to open source digital infrastructure.
• Community Engagement: While only one team member will attend FOSDEM this year due to last year’s extensive travel schedule, we’re excited about the events we’ve already planned and look forward to meeting friends old and new. We’ll probably blog about this so make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed, register for our newsletter or just visit the blog post page from time to time if you are curious.

Looking back, 2024 was an intense year, but one that ultimately strengthened us as a team. Comradery, empathy and other values are now stronger than ever and to be honest these are the secret ingredients to tackle any challenge. We’re proud of how we navigated our 2024 challenges and grateful for the opportunity to do work that aligns with our values. The same values our current team members have had since day one.

Thank you for being part of our journey. Here’s to a fulfilling 2025—for us, for you, and for the open source community at large. It’ll be a year to remember despite the new challenges our movement faces.