John McCormack DBA

SQL Server Databases and Cloud

  • Personal
    • About
  • Free Training
    • SQL Server on Amazon RDS (Free Course)
    • Free practice questions to help you pass DP-900
  • Save money in Azure
    • Azure IaaS SQL Backups – Stop burning money
    • Your Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance is too big
    • Turn the cloud off at bedtime to save 70%
    • Your Azure SQL Virtual Machine might be too big
    • Save money with Azure SQL DB serverless
    • Save up to 73% with reserved instances
    • Delete unused instances to save money in Azure
  • Hire me
    • 60 minute cost optimization
    • Let me solve your SQL Server problems
    • Take a look at my Sessionize speaker’s profile

2020 blog – a year in numbers

18th December 2020 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

Blog Performance

A few thoughts on my blog performance for 2020.

I have more than doubled my page views from 2019 to 2020 so I’m naturally delighted about that. At the time of writing and with 13 days of 2020 to go, I have had 16,773 page views. The average time on each page was 3 minutes and 53 seconds which tells me that real people are reading the content. I wasn’t really tracking this all year so these numbers were a bit of a surprise to me. In the full year of 2019, I only had 7018 page views with an average page viewing time of 3 minutes and 26 seconds.

  • 2019 blog visitors
    2019 blog visitors
  • 2020 blog visitors
    2020 blog visitors

Things are going quite well and I’ve decided to aim for 30,000 page views in 2021. Doubling the numbers again is not going to be easy, but I hope to achieve this with a steady flow of new content and updating some old material. Breaking it down, it is a modest target of 82 page views per day so is achievable if I continue to add good content.

Regular Content

I’ve been trying to put out regular content, although it is not all the same theme. I tend to find that when I solve an interesting problem, I tell myself that it would make an interesting blog post. So I’ve blogged on Azure, PowerShell, Performance tuning and whatever the #tsql2sday topic was that month. My aim for 2021 is to be a bit more specialised so you will see more posts on Azure SQL DB and Managed Instance, as well as performance tuning. These are areas I would like to work more on in 2021. Of course, I’m going to keep going with the #tsql2sday posts because they usually provide an interesting topic I wouldn’t otherwise think of.

Blog successes

One of my recent posts on database mail with managed instances has gained some traction. Although only published in October, it is already in my top 10 page views for the year. My feeling is that this is the sort of thing that people are googling for now, the MS documentation isn’t amazing either and its on trend.

One of my first ever blogs about sending html emails using database mail is at number 9. I find that hard to believe because when I see old dates on blog posts, I tend not to want to read them. I remember publishing this post and wondering if anyone would read it and even worse, if I would be ridiculed for it.

My number 1 post for the 2nd year running was EC2 SQL Server Backups to Amazon S3. I haven’t read it for a while and I think it might be in need of a major update, so I plan to do that in the next few weeks.

My 2nd most popular post, also for the 2nd year running was How to create a table in AWS Athena. I used Athena a lot in my old job and I found the documentation difficult to understand so I put together my own instructions. I can’t believe that it is still one of my most popular posts and in fact, it grew from 768 views in 2019 to 2741 views in 2020. It’s a sign to me that AWS Athena is gaining a lot of popularity. The post is 3 years old though so I think it needs to be refreshed too.

Blog disappointments

I wrote a full video series about SQL Server on AWS RDS. It wasn’t a hit. In fact, it only accounted for 246 page views. The videos are on YouTube as well and have only had 237 views. The videos were all subtitled to help with accessibility and it took me a long time. My son also did some subtitling and he got some pocket money for helping out. I have to learn from this though, I didn’t appear in the videos, they were purely PowerPoint and demos and when I think of the videos that I enjoy watching, they always have an engaging presenter.

I’m currently creating a new video series called fundamentals of Azure SQL DB Managed Instances. I hope to learn from the mistakes of my RDS course, and hopefully it will reach a wider audience.

Filed Under: front-page, Personal Tagged With: blog performance

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

John McCormack · Copyright © 2023