15 years, one server, 8GB RAM and 500k users – how Webminal refuses to die

Summary

The server webminal.org runs on a single CentOS Linux box with 8GB RAM. That’s it. No Kubernetes, no microservices, no auto-scaling. One server since 2011. It has survived: A datacenter fire in 2021 (we lost 150k user accounts) Multiple power outages in the Netherlands That one time in 2017 when a Spanish tech blog sent 10,000 users in one day My friend Freston’s insistence that Slackware is the only real distro The idea The idea was simple. I was sitting at my Windows machine at work, wanting to learn Linux. What if I could open a browser, practice on a real Linux terminal - no “Run” button, no “Execute” button, just a real server- gain the confidence, and then spin my chair to a real Linux machine and actually use it? No fear, no hesitation, because I already know what I’m doing. What’s new We just gave the entire site a redesign. Every page, from scratch. Here’s what changed: New modern UI - clean, fast, no Bootstrap or jQuery CDN dependencies. Self-hosted fonts, mobile responsive. Root Lab - practice real sysadmin skills with full root access. We use User Mode Linux to give you a complete kernel with real block devices. Practice fdisk, LVM, RAID, mkfs, systemctl,crontab, firewalld, SSH keys, awk & sed - things you can’t do on a shared terminal. Live command ticker - that scrolling bar on the homepage? It’s real. Powered by eBPF (execsnoop) tracing commands in real-time. 28 million and counting. The journey Linode → DigitalOcean → AWS → GCP → OVH → IBM Cloud → Linode Full circle. Along the way we built: a browser IDE with VS Code/Theia, Docker-over-LXC root environments, Asciinema screencasting, a shared file pool, ttyrec-to-GIF publishing, a custom useradd binary (the default was too slow with 300k+ users), and an OpenVZ-based VM provisioning system. Some still running, some killed by time or money. The co-founder I never saw I’m from India. Freston is from the Netherlands. We met on LinuxForums.org in 2010. Until 2015, we had never seen each other’s face — not ...