> In fact, prior to Amazon ec2, even Internet businesses required typically the cash to buy/house a server in a data centre which was often thousands of dollars
You seem to imply that shared servers (shell or web) did not exist prior to AWS?
You seem to imply that shared servers (shell or web) did not exist prior to AWS?
I do recall that there was typically shared PHP hosting.
ec-2 changed the game by making complete control over your own server simple, cheap, software controlled.
Shared hosting existing before but the ec2 formula was the one that worked.
As far as I know EC2 introduced auto scaling, load balancing and spinning up instances in such a lightweight way. Not a revolution but still nice and necessary steps.
If you built a website 20 years ago and it exploded in traffic, shared hosting without easy scaling would not be a solution. You would have to plan your growth and pre-order shared instances. Thus making your business cash dependent again without proven growth.
You could host a reasonably successful web site on a relatively low end server (say, a Sparc 10) off a T1 line (1.5 megabits) and serve a ton of users. They all had crappy connections and were used to waiting.
Google ran for many years on piles of commodity boards and they were expanding pretty fast...
The amount of marketing hype around cloud services is insane because all the big tech companies have a vested interest in your renting their platforms. It doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't 15 years ago, just makes it easy.
Plus, the level of resources for configuring EC2-like servers, and Heroku-esque preconfigured servers reduce the barrier to entry pretty significantly.
AWS was the first place where a joe-developer could dial up a machine to use without a heavy sales process and involving purchasing, legal etc.
This all played out slowly though : at first AWS was only used for things like running tests, replacing developer desktop hosted VMWare. It took a few years to get to the point where it was used in the way we are familiar with today.
fwiw when AWS (EC2 really) started, Internet/Web services weren't even typically run on x86 hardware or Linux. Solaris, AIX, HPUX et al ruled.
AWS didn't launch until 2006, which was actually pretty late in the internet game. x86 Linux hosting was ubiquitous then. If you're talking Solaris, AIX, and HPUX, you're remembering the late 90's...