10th Anniversary of SQL Authority – Thank YOU!

10 years ago, today I started to blog, at https://blog.sqlauthority.com – I had no idea where this journey will bring me. I honestly had no idea. Lots of people ask me so many questions about blog so today, let me answer five of the most popular questions, which I keep on receiving. Today is the 10th Anniversary of SQLAuthority.com

Question 1: How did I come up with the name SQL Authority?

Answer: In my early career I was a ColdFusion programming language developer. One of the most popular resourceful websites for ColdFusion was CFAuthority and I always enjoyed the information available there. The website always had useful information and was always to the point. I was inspired from it and named my blog SQL Authority.

Question 2: How did I start to blog?

Answer: The answer to this question is a bit dramatic. Just like every DBA, I create various maintenance scripts which I can use again and again (i.e. Backup scripts, index maintenance scripts, etc.). Initially, I used excel to store all of my scripts but very soon, I realize that it is not a good way to store my SQL Scripts as it changes its formatting. After this I tried various different platforms and tools, but none of them worked out well. One of my experiments was blogging platform (Google Blogspot and WordPress). I really had no idea what is blogging 10 years ago (trust me – WordPress had been at that time just 3 years old and have very little traffic).

One fine day, I received an email from one individual who said he liked my script related to index maintenance and requested some enhancements. I was a bit stunned when I noticed that he had included the link to my WordPress blog. It is when I realized that my blog was public and was accessible by the entire world. He had found my blog via Lycos (search engine, which no longer exists) search. I was thrilled with this new discovery, it was like a new toy for kid. I spent quite a lot of time to understand the platform and decided to continue my journey with everyone.

Question 3: How do I get time to blog every single day from last 10 years? 

Answer: I have never missed a single blog post a day routine for last 10 years. I see blog is helping over a million individuals every single month (daily unique visitors are over 50,000) and it gives me amazing satisfaction to keep on finding time every single day to write new content which can be helpful.

Question 4: How much time it takes me to write one blog post?

Answer: I spend every day around one hour to write a blog post, but spend over 6 to 8 hours to do many different tasks related to blogging. Lots of people think it is easy manage a popular blog, but it is not true, it requires lots of time to manage and sustain the blog.

My wife and I both spend numerous hours in keeping the blog running at optimal speed (it should be loaded under 2 seconds, anywhere in the world). There are times when, after spending hours working on a blog every single day, when we go to sleep, we have an even longer list of items to accomplish the next day.

Here is a brief list of activities one has to do to manage a popular blog: (I am limiting the list to 10, the actual task list has 38 different items)

1. Answering comments
2. Updating WordPress platform and plugins
3. Keeping a check on hosting and uptime dashboards
4. Backup and restore routine test (I do daily, multiple times)
5. Malware and security analysis
6. Managing Webmaster’s tool
7. Creating AMP pages for Google
8. Creating Instant articles for Facebook
9. Managing social media related to blog – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube
10. Managing Email List

Question 5: How do I make money?

Answer: There three major sources of income for me.

Blog Advertisements

I invest 100% back in running blog and its infrastructure.
I trust me this is a huge cost and extremely transparent to all the readers.

Consulting Work via Hire Me

I only take SQL Server performance tuning consultation and I keep reasonably busy with the assignments.

Paid speaking engagements

I do not do trainings, these are high quality 90 minutes SQL Server related talks.

Well, that about top 5 questions from the list of the questions, I receive every single day.

What Next-

I am still excited about the blog as I was 10 years before and nothing changes. You will see me blogging as usual. I have a few experiments planned to blog, but I will write about them in detail in the near future.

Meanwhile, if you have slow performing SQL Server, let me know, I will be able to help you run it faster. Click the link to get started to Fix Your SQL Server Performance.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)