Hard to believe it’s been nine years since we first went online! Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think we would grow this big and be helping so many people out with all of their satellite and home theater needs!
After I was locked out of my administrator account at DBStalk I never planned on opening SatelliteGuys, but due to the encouragement of John Corn I took a chance and opened up yet another satellite forum. I honestly didn’t think people would follow me from DBStalk but surprisingly almost everyone did!
I am shocked and humbled that now nine years later many of the people who signed up with us on day one of our existence are still here as active SatelliteGuys members today! Thank you to all of these SatelliteGuys Pioneers! Many of these pioneers are listed here as Supporting Founders as they helped donate money to keep us going, this was before we had ads and Pub Memberships. These guys pitched in and helped without me asking for help. They knew that I was running the site out of my pocket and wanted to keep the lights on for all. They have succeeded! So to all of these Supporting Pub Members I say THANK YOU for helping us get to where we are today!
As SatelliteGuys bloomed over the years so have the costs of running the site, and with that unfortunately we have had to use ads. Even with the ads there were many, many months where I was covering the costs of running the site out of my own pocket. Even with the ads today I still find myself digging in to cover things when it’s needed and I will tell you what… I don’t mind one bit! SatelliteGuys is not a business for me, for me I still consider it a labor of love and a hobby and I still enjoy every moment as I did when I first started the site.
With the addition of ads we had some members understandably upset by the ads which I do admit can be annoying, so we started offering Ad Free “Pub Memberships” this helped us deal with the loss of ad revenue from these members and just like the original Supporting Founders help us keep the lights on, and in fact still help us pay the bills. To everyone who is or was a supporting Pub Member thank you for your support. Not only does the money help pay the bills, but it means a great deal to me that you enjoy and hopefully learn so much from the site that you want to support it! Honestly there have been some months that if it were not for the support of the Pub Members we might not be here or a lot more features and forums would only be available to registered members. So again THANK YOU to all the Pub Members over the years for their support!
As you might have noticed when I named the site I named it SatelliteGuys with an ‘s’ at the end, I did this as I wanted to show the world that the site was more than just one person. That’s why I want to take a moment to thank the staff which has served us over the past nine years! I honestly believe we have the best staff anywhere! One of the big things that made SatelliteGuys a success is we have never been normal. In fact I have always been proud that we have always marched to the beat of our own drummer! Sometimes my ideas were good, sometimes they were not so good, but my staff was always there giving me their feedback, and while there have been times when I have butted heads with staff, I feel that has made us better. I am not perfect, nor am I the ultimate SatelliteGuy but my staff has always been there for me helping to make SatelliteGuys better. No matter how old the site gets I still hope to learn something new each day and make SatelliteGuys better for you! So a big thank you to the staff, for not only elf’ing my posts to make me look good, but for being here day in and out helping our members learn more about this amazing technology!
When I first started SatelliteGuys the satellite companies were afraid of us and quite honestly wanted nothing to do with us. My how times have changed, as now we are working with the satellite companies to get you more accurate information and better help for your issues! I personally started meeting with DISH management over 4 years ago to help for the DISH INTERNET RESPONSE TEAM or as we know them here, DIRT. The journey to get them here was a long expensive one, but I think most DISH customers would agree it was worth it! We are now working with DISH on a number of things helping them improve their products before they release them to the general public! I am proud that 65 of our members recently helped DISH test and fix bugs in the new Hopper Game Finder App which is making its official debut this weekend! We have other members helping DISH test new hardware and software which we are really excited about. With DIRECTV we openly admit that we screwed up with them a few years ago, but I am happy to report that the doors are opening and have started working with them again and hope for more in the future. Some people might think of SatelliteGuys as the DISH site, and quite honestly I would like to change that perception. I want to support all of our members no matter who their provider is. The door is always open to provide whatever resources we can to any multichannel provider so that we can better support their customers.
In the 9 years since we have started we have grown from renting space on a server, to renting our own server, to now where we have 3 servers operating which we own bringing you SatelliteGuys. We take great pride in keeping our servers running in order to bring you SatelliteGuys as fast as possible! Those who are Pub Members can attest to the great speeds our servers operate at. Those using ad blockers can kind of see the speed a little, but unfortunately the ad blockers also block some key components needed to see SatelliteGuys properly so they are not seeing the true site or true speed.
In our first month of operation we served just over 9,600 unique IP addresses and have grown to where last month we served over a half million unique IP addresses! We went from a single member and I am proud that soon we will be hitting the 200,000[SUP]th[/SUP] member milestone!
Thank you to everyone for being part of the SatelliteGuys family over the past 9 years! Thank you for telling your friends or posting about SatelliteGuys at other sites. Spreading the word about SatelliteGuys has been our only real form of advertising over the years. You have been the key to our success and we look forward to serving you in the future!
So to all the supporters, sponsors, staff and most importantly YOU, I would like to thank you for everything! We have done some amazing things in 9 years and from where I am sitting the future looks bright as well!
Don’t forget to visit SatelliteGuys often this weekend, so that you can enter to win yourself one of those new Amazon Kindle Fire HD tablets! Remember you can enter every 10 minutes all weekend long all the way through Monday Night at 11:59PM!
Thanks again for everything!
Best,
Scott
(P.S. – A number of our members have been asking us to make SatelliteGuys Shirts and Hats available again. We are currently working on this and will have more information soon! Thanks again!)