I worked as a Unix systems administrator 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago. 20 years ago, in 1995, a tech startup would usually have the pr

I worked as a Unix systems administrator 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago. 20 years ago, in 1995, a tech startup would usually have the programmers do the systems administration, until about four programmers or so had been hired - by then the code would be in shape to put on the Java application server, traffic was picking up, and they needed someone to deal with it full-time, who knew what they were doing. The servers would often be on-site, on the company's T-1 line, or sometimes would be at a colocation facility. Nowadays, how many people are hired at a tech startup before they hire someone to deal with installing Red Hat on HP rack servers? It can be a while - nowadays if you need 500 servers quickly, and have the money, you can spin them up (and down) on EC2 in a few minutes. Plus there's Linode, Rackspace, Ramnode - I have a personal VPS on each of them. Why not? It's only $10-$20 a month each. It's hard to justify the cost of hiring a sysadmin, a backup person to the sysadmin, pay for colo space, leasing a server etc., when you can get a pretty nice Linode VPS for $10 a month.