ServeTheHome Turns 16

ServeTheHome (STH) is now an old site by Internet standards. For the site’s sweet 16, I just wanted to mark the occasion by penning a few quick thoughts on this last year.

Less Change!

This might be the only time that you hear me trumpet this, but in our STH Turns 15 Amazing Years Old piece, we had gone through an immense year of changes. We moved STH to Arizona. I got married. Both my wife and I had to move from New York City and Austin, Texas, to Arizona. Then we had a baby just before STH’s birthday. This time last year, I barely remember since I was running on short periods of a few minutes’ worth of sleep at a time. As an aside, I just tell folks that there was a period before my son was born that I probably remember less because it feels like the before times. It was a bit strange going through two of those “before times” in a row with the pandemic, then the baby, but here we are. It is hard to believe that this little guy, who was keeping me up on two-hour change, feed, burp, sleep cycles, has become so much fun in a year.

Over the past year, the STH main site has grown steadily. For many publishers, traffic has gone way down. To be perfectly frank, search snippets, AI assistants, and more have hurt a lot of smaller publishers. What you are seeing is that many publishers are now leaning heavily into news and putting out lots of content. If you lose 30% of your page views in a year, then make 40% more content you can grow, but your views per piece continue to decline.

At the same time, most will have noticed that the YouTube channel is becoming substantial. This is something for the Q2 2025 STH Letter from the Editor, but as we close in on 1 million subscribers, something I never thought would be possible, we have been working on many cool projects.

I went to the Olympic Games Paris 2024 and did a video:

One, of course, was the largest AI cluster at the time:

The other is the new Dell AI Factory tour:

As the channel has grown, so have the projects we have been taking on. Aside from the last video that is too new to amass a large set of views, every single long-form video that we have produced in the last year has had over 100,000 views. I can also tell you that we have seen 100,000 views on the associated main site pieces. Thinking back to 2009 when I started STH as a personal blog, I can tell you that I never thought STH would turn into a family of folks working to bring you great content every day, but also send me all over showing off cool server hardware.

I also never thought we would have a big studio to produce content for the site. It is fun to look back two years and see the shell of the studio compared to what it is today. Perhaps after this summer’s re-design it will be time for a tour.

Final Words

We will get into more behind-the-scenes in this month’s Letter from the Editor, but I want to say thank you to everyone who has made this possible. These days I sometimes catch myself sitting on a plane, seeing a huge AI installation, or just playing with a fun upcoming chip or system and think “I cannot believe STH has allowed me to do all of this.” Maybe the key takeaway is that if you have some time this summer, start a project you have been meaning to. STH started with playing using RAID controllers with 2.5″ enterprise hard drives and trying to share that experience and has taken me all over the world. Maybe I am just getting old, but still working 70-85 hour weeks I am energized by the cool opportunities STH brings and getting to share more than just a RAID controller and few hard drives with the STH community.

Again, thank you to the entire STH community for making this possible. Stay tuned later this month to see how the team is growing and what we are doing behind-the-scenes and what the future holds.