10X-ing everything: The SSD Nodes 2018 in review

2018 has been a whirlwind for SSD Nodes. As the founder of a bootstrapped cloud hosting provider, I don’t get to say a lot of things with certainty, but that’s one of them. The good news is that as far as whirlwinds go, it’s been a pretty positive year for SSD Nodes. We’ve launched new products, built new tools to help you get more done on your servers, and made everything we do a little bit better. So, as 2018 wraps up and 2019 looms large on our collective horizon, I thought this was a good time to look back on some of the most whirlwind-ish things that happened this year. If nothing else, I get to plant some goalposts for the year to come.

What changed throughout the year

Some things are impossible to pin down to a specific day or event. We made a lot of changes that took the entire year, or don’t really have a start/end date.

New members of the team

I wanted big things for SSD Nodes in 2018, and I quickly realized I need to bring on new talent to help in these efforts. Content marketing has always been a significant component of our growth. I wanted to scale it this year and give the team more freedom to try out some more bombastic types of content. We brought on two new writers, DD and Ranvir, to help write new tutorials and give Joel more flexibility to try out some “10X content” that might elevate our efforts to the next level. Ranvir has since gone on to become a part of our engineering team, helping us deploy our new 10X servers and find new technologies to bring onto our platform. Later in the year, we brought on Rob, who is now our inbound marketing guru and the man behind those Black Friday emails you most likely saw. He’s helping us ramp up our PPC efforts and, basically, get more people on the SSD Nodes platform, whether that’s on our original SSD servers or the new 10X Cloud. Charter, who I worked with in the past, has come onboard to make us 10X more data-aware. He’s building brilliant ways for us to get better insight into who our users are and what they want and get us organized as he does it. Killer.

53 new blog posts

While it might not have been our biggest blog year in terms of volume, 2018’s 53 new blog posts (54 including this post) were our most ambitious, expansive, and useful. We tried out massive multi-part tutorials, experimented with content no other cloud provider has even thought about, and got in touch with our developer side. Here’s a few of my favorites: