Back then, using traditional IT providers or internal IT services, you needed weeks, paperwork, etc, to get any storage or compute.
Then AWS arrives, and you could have infinite storage, or tens of EC2 instances, within a few minutes. And pay with a freaking credit card!
It didn't matter that AWS' performance was abysmal at the time. Or that AWS was expensive. AWS solved a huge pain point for millions of people, and that's why it became a market leader.
Price is not the only thing that matters.
Price matters when all of your other advantages have been eroded away.
> I know why; I was there! (first AWS employee in EU, 2008, stayed there until 2014).
Btw, another of your claim-to-fame is that the current Amazon CEO follows you on twitter, one among the 300 odd accounts :)
S3 was orders of magnitude cheaper than anything comparable at the time.
Cheaper for cold storage. For anything that requires high IOPS or egress trafic S3 has always been very expensive.
If your load wasn't high, cause you're a startup or whatever, then paying the extra premium on the storage to save the engineering effort of building your own storage cluster worked out. Then when you were big, those egress costs had you locked out.
Plus add in thoughts about having to maintain infra vs aws do it for you and you had a lot of developer blogs/marketing sites of tech companies/whatever just serve on s3 since it was easy to use and the absolute cost for such a product is low enough that they didn't care about the relative cost of s3 vs other services.
Cross Region replication is typical setup for many DR use cases and S3 will charge you Inter-region transfer cost for replication as well.
Second tier Cloud providers would eat that up, since it would democratize things more. Even if a competitor gets the customer, at least it's not the guy who is waging a war of attrition against you.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-t...
For many organizations, the 24x7 staffing needed to provide an equivalent service alone would pay for their entire storage cost multiple times over. Even if your scale is sufficient to allow beating that, you are likely to have more compelling problems for that time to be spent on.
(This is not saying that the egress charges are great, only that I completely understand why many, many people decided it was an acceptable tradeoff)
Even the startups that grew, they might start on a VPS provider, but outgrow them. S3 managed to scale with them and retain them as customers.
That coupled with storage costs that were always very competitive and the fact you had unlimited scale and PAYG pricing got a lot of people hooked.
It’s going to take a long time for S3 customers who have experienced pretty amazing uptime and reliability for the entire life of the service to put the same level of trust in something else.
CF did a really smart thing by making R2 be able to operate as a transparent caching-replica of S3.
But doing durable storage yourself, especially once the amounts get a bit unwieldy is scary. For low amounts of data you can get away with just making plenty of copies in different places, but that gets much more difficult once it's a serious amount of data. Object storage is the most appealing service even if you want to do most of the stuff yourself. And this is an area where an established track record is important, you don't want to store your data if you're not sure the service is reliable.