For the kinds of things medium-big spenders spend money on (mostly, largish amounts of network storage and the network to connect it to app servers) AWS was the

For the kinds of things medium-big spenders spend money on (mostly, largish amounts of network storage and the network to connect it to app servers) AWS was the first major provider to be decently competitive. I remember pricing this out at the time, a lot of what you're paying for on EC2 is proximity to EBS, which other providers at the time either didn't have an equivalent to or charged several multiples of AWS prices. If it's 2010 you're used to the costs of a hosted or coloed system with tens of TB of NetApp storage starting your next project on AWS was compelling in a way discount providers was not.