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Comment by reallydude | Hacker News Reader

> companies did IN FACT time share servers.

Ok. It was so uncommon that I didn't encounter it for the 15 years preceding AWS. It's like pointing to a car that runs on vegetable oil. Yes there are IN FACT cars that run on vegetable oil, but nobody does it statistically. This is much different than the chance that a business (with income) is renting commercial space. Yes your local mom and pop pool company doesn't rent an office (and that's a non-trivial amount of businesses, as I've worked for some), but they aren't going to rent space in WeWork anyway.

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>> companies did IN FACT time share servers.

> Ok. It was so uncommon that I didn't encounter it for the 15 years preceding AWS.

That just shows that.. you may not have enough experience. Time sharing was the norm before personal computers.

Some good reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing

After the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s, timesharing was reserved for only the largest mainframes (you might see a bunch of people huddled around a large cage in an Exodus colocation). I stand by the fact that it was exceedingly rare.

Sorry, but this was the dominant computing model equivalent to renting servers at AWS. I'm not even talking about "website hosting at $5 per month". If a business wanted powerful machines, you rented them.

Companies didn't own mainframes, generally. Your understanding of "exceedingly rare" is incorrect. The statement that AWS invented the rented server model is also incorrect.

I got my start in web development by renting a shared-hosting account on https://www.dreamhost.com/ .

And Dreamhost predates AWS by a full 10 years.

Shared Hosting is a different model than that being discussed here. Shared hosting never scaled based on usage. To carry the analogy forward that was the same as renting a traditional office space where you had to guess what kind of capacity you needed, and had to limited access to services.

Shared hosting frequently scaled based on usage! They often had limited disk space, bandwidth, and sometimes even CPU cycles, and either you could pay to increase the limit or they'd bill you for overages.

For an extreme example, here's a shared hosting company that's been around since 2002: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting

That's not really the same thing as the AWS model, thoughm is it? A Linode or Digital Ocean VPS has multiple price levels, but "choose the price level that most closely matches the resources you think you're going to need" is not the same as "metered usage billing."

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