Annual report number 11 + 12: My Success

Back in December of 2004 I started a new life from zero. I was 22 years old without any money, education or connections. I borrowed my mothers computer and started to learn HTML and internet marketing.

Each year I publish an annual report. Earlier reports are linked from the history section in my about page.

Personal life

I have a wonderful family and I have now been married for soon 9 years with my wonderful wife. Our son is now 7 years old and our daughter 5 and we have another one on the way. I am truly grateful.

We did follow our 5 year plan and so on the beginning of 2016 we moved back to Sweden, managed to get a bank loan and bought a nice house in Täby, Stockholm. The children goes to school here and the house is really in a wonderful family friendly location with a park just outside the door. Another life goal accomplished.

N.nu

N.nu is really a great tool. I haven't touched WordPress in years now and I am very thankful for that. This blog is of course also on N.nu.

Some of the things done:

New design for the landing page:

Responsive templates and responsive navigation for custom templates, info in Swedish.
I made templates.n.nu for our internal work with the templates.
Support for https for when using your own domain, info in Swedish.
Support for using åäö in URLs, info in Swedish.
Custom contact form, info in Swedish.

DomainStats

This is a project I started in july 2015. It is my passion and what I have been working more than part time on since then. And I have something exciting to announce about this in a month or so.

DomainStats crawls the web and collects data about millions of domains using various methods. It is running on 4 dedicated servers and offers API access as well as other tools. It has more than a billion links in the database.

What I have learned:

Experience using more advanced data structures in Redis and how to shard it across servers.
More how servers work, mostly in the aspect of performance. The importance of tracking disc io.
Apache Cassandra, at least the basics and how it is like to push it to it's limits. Cassandra is not good for delete heavy applications and one table that was working like a que I moved to Redis instead.
More fluent and skilled in many aspects of PHP.
MySQL database tuning and query performance. How it is like to push Innodb to it's limits, dealing with tables with 550 million rows, splitting big tables, moving MySQL to another server and so on.
A better understanding of what is out there on the internet. The huge amount of garbage and spam.

I am proud to say that I built all of DomainStats myself and that it is now a really important SEO tool for several SEO professionals in Sweden and it is indispensable for my company TodaysWeb.

I am working hard on releasing version 2 which will be something I really want to show people, stay tuned!

Other things in TodaysWeb

It is going really good for TodaysWeb. We made the gross income objective for both 2015 and 2016. And we truly get great results with our clients. A number of major websites where built, apps published and of course crazy results with our SEO services. We also sell technical services to several SEO companies in Sweden. 7 people in the office + 4 remote workers. New office in central location in Cochabamba. When I moved to Sweden Staffan Sundblad became the CEO. I am still an Advisor and Founder but not involved in the day to day operations.

Our main focus has been to build a large network of websites which we use to promote our clients websites. I also built Snappa.se which shows data on the domains on the .se and .nu droplist. We had this data internally for a long time but decided to publish a limited version of it before other companies do it. We also built landningssajt.se which describes one of our services.

These days I work almost only with DomainStats.

Our Charity

In the last 2 years TodaysWeb has has donated little more than 4K USD and we have collected another 12K from other companies to be used for the poor in Bolivia (thanks!). We are planning to help a children hospital that desperately need help as well as poor familes in very poor areas of Bolivia. More info and photos will come.

New swedish website: jimwestergren.se