BoxyBSD: Powering 500+ Free BSD VPS for Open-Source
():This weekend marks an incredible milestone for BoxyBSD: the provisioning of our 500th free VPS instance. What started as a small passion project to support the open-source community has grown into a global platform helping learners, enthusiasts, and open-source contributors gain real-world experience with BSD systems.
Building a Bridge to BSD and Beyond
BoxyBSD was founded with a clear mission: to lower the barrier of entry to BSD-based operating systems. By offering free virtual private servers (VPS), BoxyBSD enables anyone to learn, experiment, and contribute without worrying about hosting costs or vendor lock-in.
Users can deploy and explore a wide range of operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, as well as niche platforms such as DragonFly BSD, MidnightBSD, and even Illumos for the (Open)Solaris community. This diversity makes BoxyBSD a unique learning and testing environment for BSD and UNIX-like systems.
Empowering Learners and Open-Source Projects
Hands-on experience is essential for mastering system administration, networking, and security. BoxyBSD’s free VPS platform provides a safe, real-world sandbox where users can configure firewalls, deploy web services, debug scripts, and experiment freely — turning mistakes into valuable lessons instead of costly errors.
For open-source projects, BoxyBSD offers free hosting infrastructure that removes financial barriers and accelerates collaboration. Many community-driven initiatives now rely on BoxyBSD as a foundation to prototype, test, and grow their ideas.
Recognized by the BSD Community
The feedback from the BSD community has been incredibly motivating — especially within BSD.cafe, founded by Stefano Marinelli. Both projects share the same goal: welcoming newcomers and strengthening the BSD ecosystem through accessibility, education, and collaboration.
BSD systems are renowned for their stability, performance, and open-source philosophy. Seeing BoxyBSD recognized as a valuable contributor to this ecosystem is a true honor, and the ongoing support from users around the world keeps the project evolving.
Recently launched is also a new Matrix bot in the VPS provisioning channel. Developed by gyptazy, the bot automates essential workflows such as VPS requests and automatic instance creation, significantly improving the onboarding experience for new users.
The Road Ahead
Reaching 500 free VPS instances is only the beginning. BoxyBSD will continue to expand capacity, improve automation, and explore new partnerships to further support the BSD and open-source communities. The long-term goal remains unchanged: open access to powerful infrastructure for learning and innovation.
To everyone who has supported BoxyBSD — by using the platform, sharing the mission, or contributing to open-source projects — thank you. This milestone belongs to the community, and the next 500 instances will be even more exciting.
Special thanks go to Moritz Mantel, Nerdscave-Hosting, and Servermanagementpanel for providing additional computing resources and helping BoxyBSD scale far beyond what would have been possible alone.
If you want to learn more, join the community, or deploy your own free BSD VPS, visit BoxyBSD.com or join us on Matrix at #boxybsd:bsd.cafe. Let’s keep open-source alive — one box at a time. And within the recent talks about BoxyBSD you can learn more about my project.