VMGuru.nl 1 year anniversary

One year ago, October 13th, we announced our new website/blog called VMGuru.nl and October 15th we posted our first article ‘No guest customization after upgrade to Update 2’. Much has change since then….

The birth of VMGuru.nl
When, in August 2008, I changed my Internet provider I had to look for a new place to host my personal website. Luckily a colleague, Alex, has a web server on-line and offered to host it for me. The only thing I needed was a domain name, so I registered at NederHost and tried some domain names. Most were already taken but my first good one was VMGuru.nl, however I discarded the idea because my personal website has nothing to do with virtualization. After registering Motor-Freak.net I decided to keep VMGuru.nl just for the fun of it. Maybe in the future me and some colleagues could do something nice with it.

When I mentioned the domain name again in the beginning of October 2008 Alex grabbed the opportunity and quickly deployed a website using WordPress. The idea was to use it to  share our knowledge and experiences with colleagues as we don’t have a good enough Intranet to do that. Quickly the idea broadened and we decided to share with the VMware/virtualization community which required us to write in English.

My first steps
From the start reactions were positive, with 851 visits and 80.316 hits for the remaining two weeks of October we were very surprised. In November the number of visitors grew to 4.538 and in December we had almost 10 times the number of visitors we had in October, 7.059 . In these first two and a half months we wrote 72 articles with subjects like ‘What if life was a virtual machine..‘, ‘VC Upgrade went haywire‘, ‘Faulty HP ESXi 3.5 USBs‘ and ‘Hyper-V, not in my datacenter!‘.

My first fight
In the beginning of February we ran into a nasty comment in the community claiming that we ‘stole’ someones domain name. It turned out to be a comment of Scott Herold (VMGuru.com) who, after finding out a colleagues had registered ‘vmgu.ru’ just to annoy him, discovered VMGuru.nl. All ended in a fizzle, after explaining our intentions and the idea that we could both contribute to the community, each in our own way, all was well. Scott turned out to be a decent guy and we planned to meet up at VMworld in Cannes at the end of the month. We even did a video with him on VESI.org!

My first vacation
Last year we attended VMworld Europe for the first time so in February 2009 we returned and decided to hang it all out. We printed VMGuru.nl business cards to promote our website, we announced to report live form VMworld Europe and decided to provide extensive video footage of the event.

It was a very busy period, the three of us (Anne Jan, Edwin and myself) wrote 23 articles and taped/edited/published 8 videos in 4 days. So almost no parties for us because this took a lot of time, especially the editing of the videos was very time consuming. We all got a maximum of 15 hours sleep during these 4 days but it was well worth it.

During VMworld Europe the website statistics went through the roof with almost 294.000 hits and 4.500 visits in only 6 days.

My first party
During VMworld Europe Anne Jan and myself also had our first VMGuru.nl related party. Wednesday morning we both received an e-mail from John Troyer congratulating us with becoming one of the first VMware vExperts. We received this vExpert status for the work we do on VMGuru.nl, the trainings, workshops and seminars we give and/or organize. This was an acknowledgment and a great boost for our work for VMGuru.nl.

My 1st birthday
Of course there is no birthday without gifts so if you’re coming to our party or just want to congratulate us, this is my wish-list:

• a new server to host our website on;
• sponsors to share the cost of running this website;
• invitations to interesting virtualization related events;
• beta testing invitations.

We want to thank everybody who visited, supported us and gave us feedback. We hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did and we hope we can keep you informed for another few years.

My statistics (1st year):

Number of articles: 355
Number of comments: 280
Active authors: Arjan (3), Sander (16), Alex (14), Edwin (19), Anne Jan (95), Erik (155).

Total visits: 192.465
Total hits: 8.147.290 (8.1M)
Total traffic: 318 GB

Total visitors: 45.208
Unique visitors: 29.193

Top 5 by  geographical location:
United States: 13.507
Netherlands: 10.507
United Kingdom: 3.106
Germany: 2.244
Canada: 1.448

Best month so far: September 2009, 1.3M hits, 48,3GB traffic, 30.772 visits

Top 5 best read articles:

1. Upgrading VMware ESX 3.5 to ESX 4.0 (vSphere), 3.110 views
2. Visio Stencil for VMware Host & Cluster descriptions, 1.535 views
3. Our first XEN-Experience, a XenServer 5.5 testdrive, 1.354 views
4. Upgrade VMware View 3.0 to 3.1, 892 views
5. Enterprise Hypervisor comparison, 821 views
   

VMGuru.nl going global: