On March 1, 2008, we shared a little post with you about a project we were working on. The blog warned you about data loss, and offered the chance to request a beta code for our new product. That was our first blog post, ever. According to Google Analytics, people weren’t too interested right off the bat. But a few days later they started tuning in, and our community began to form. Since our founding, we’ve reached a few fun milestones. I thought I’d take a moment to mark them here, especially given today’s date.

14 Years

That’s right, 14 years ago today we were officially recognized by the state of Delaware as a corporation. Shortly thereafter, the five co-founders were working together, cranking away in a one-bedroom Palo Alto apartment to get Backblaze off the ground.

It has been an incredible journey since then. Early on, we moved out of that apartment into our San Mateo office, celebrated reaching 10 petabytes of data under management, and launched Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

We are so grateful to the customers who’ve entrusted us with their data over the past fourteen years. We are thankful to our team members for their dedication to Backblaze and our values. And we are very appreciative to all of the folks that have joined us here on the blog. We could not have made it this far without all 20 million of you.

Yes, we recently realized that we’ve had 20 million unique visitors to the blog since that first post back in 2008. You came for the Storage Pods, the Drive Stats, the drive farming, the stories about growing a business, and some of the other nearly 1,000 posts we’ve shared since launch.

Happily, our readership has expanded substantially over the years, with many of you commenting, sharing your own experiences, and trying out our products. It’s great that a lot of folks have found value in the content we share. It’s even cooler for those we’ve empowered to easily store and use data with our products.

There are a lot of milestones we’re proud of—passing an exabyte of data under management, restoring more than 50 billion files, or serving nearly 500,000 customers. We started Backblaze because we knew backing up was too difficult and expensive. Seeing all these growing numbers means the mission we started with all those years ago—to make storing and using data astonishingly easy—has caught on.

Celebrating 14 years by reaching 20 million readers means we get to geek out with 20 million people who care about data as much as we do! Thank you for joining us over the last 14 years, and we look forward to the journey ahead.