A site like Flickr is exactly what you want to keep as far away from AWS as possible.
https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
Everyone else is more than happy to give more money to cloud hosting companies.
If so, it's available at https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-else...
This blog entry from 2006[1] is only 13 years old, but feels like it should be older. Back then, putting that much data for a publicly accessible site was considered pretty insane.
[1] https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2006/08/12/amazon-s3-the-holy-...
S3 was invented in 2006.
What was S3 used for if not for hosting website data?
Because looking back at that, it feels odd that it's only 13 years ago, and how much the industry has changed in that time.
Back then S3 was this weird thing that Amazon came out with. A file hosting service that didn't let you do anything except store or fetch files.
Sure, it's low cost... but I can't process them without downloading them again and paying for the data access (twice!). Why the hell would I want that?
SmugMug's use case was the first I saw that actually made sense.
Back then, if you weren't able to afford buying a server and putting it in a colo facility, you'd go rent a server on a monthly/yearly basis from the likes of ThePlanet, and host those files yourself on your server. If you needed redundancy, you'd have to figure out syncing between the servers yourself.
Now? Spin up an AWS instance or trigger a function, serve a link to the file in S3 or via a cloudfront distribution. Even if you need to process the data before serving it - stream it straight out of S3, through your application and to the user.
I really doubt they switched to AWS because it's "cool".
Also, isn't CDN bandwidth and data transfer going to be the lion's share of their costs? That's not a problem you can just throw dedicated servers at.
Also, data transfer and bandwidth is far cheaper with dedicated and colos than AWS.
Vs. managing an Amazon account from a desk, any desk really, you don’t see the appeal?
You say: "But those are really expensive, require a ton of maintenance, and hard to sell later on"
Your agent looks at you and says: "Yes but do you really went to find land, get the permits, get it developed, deal with all those contractors and deal with the inevitable problems of a new constructions? A McMansion is obviously better."
The agent has apparently never heard of apartments, condos, semi-detached and so on (yet somehow holds a very strong opinion). This is a problem; you find a new agent.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-servers-for-fun-and-p...
Dealing with security patches isn't anything you wouldn't already be doing with AWS, and is in some cases easier on dedicated hardware.
We've had to fix: crappy datacenter networking, BMC issues left in place by the datacenter, hard drives spewing SMART errors, USB devices being plugged into our servers, bad RAM. Our datacenter company _moved_ at one point and we had a few hours of downtime as a server was driven to the new site.
Each of these isn't too bad, but when hardware issues or any kind of flakiness happens in "the cloud", it's so much easier to just bin the server and boot a new one – GCP will even live-migrate your VM as necessary to do this. That makes it so much more flexible. You can achieve this on dedicated servers, but not without a well resourced infrastructure team, which we (and many other companies of our size) do not have.
We don't believe we're going to save money moving to the cloud, we think it's going to cost more in fact, but we also believe we'll speed up quite significantly as a result of the move.
Image and video hosting is usually significantly cheaper on bare metal where you just get unmetered bandwidth from housing providers
It's still more expensive unless they get paid for using the bandwidth though