Well speaking about the last 15 years, so 2007 to today, for me it was the same as modern clouds - register, add a credit card, order a server, few minutes later the root password arrives in e-mail. And oldschool LAMP webhosting is basically serverless cloud.

Edit: Actually I remember using actual cloud provider back in 2008 - it was called Virtualmaster, one of the first cloud providers in central EU. They offered a free (!) VPS with 256 MB RAM and 1/4 CPU - I had a minimalist Debian image that allowed me to run full LAMP stack on it and an IRC client in tmux session.

Another cool central EU provider was 4smart. Their offering used to be that you only paid for resources you actually used - but for VMs. If you consumed only 10MB RAM, you only paid for that. I had servers cheaper than 1 EUR/month running continuosly with their own IPv4 there. They changed the pricing structure after few years.