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I want to add: Linode, Slicehost, Rackspace, and other good hosts have been around way before AWS and offer very good VPS services that one can scale with ease

I want to add: Linode, Slicehost, Rackspace, and other good hosts have been around way before AWS and offer very good VPS services that one can scale with ease. Auto scaling is not unique to Amazon. It isn't a cloud thing either. One could scale quite flexibly for at least 20 years now. Unfortunately all the misinformed boot camp coding hipsters don't know their history but love to be plenty opinionated about technology as an artistic movement. And you get these wide reaching grabs for whimsical awe, full of misinformation. Dollar Shave Club was nothing but a marketing success. The tech has absolutely nothing to do with it. Cute narrative attempt, I guess.

sixhobbits 10y ago
EC2 was released in 2006. Digital Ocean was founded in 2011.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  Okay thanks. I will remove digital ocean, my mistake. Linode and Slicehost I have used for many many years though so I'm sure those are correct.
  - sixhobbits 10y ago
    I wasn't really in the cloud world in 2006, but AFAIK EC2 was pretty inventive/original/game changing in that it allowed anyone to immediately fire up and use VPS. Although there were (small) exiting services, these had enterprise entry level requirements, where you had to be approved as a customer before hand, provide all code that you wanted to run on their machines, and contact humans on the provider's end in order to up/down scale. Open to correction.
    - goldenkey 10y ago
      Linode and other hosts have had online billing since their inception. You could always launch a VPS on linode in seconds. Even shittier hosts like HostGator or Dreamhost never required human contact to launch new servers. EC2 was game changing for certain reasons but what you mention sbout 'enterprise' was never an issue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode
    - TylerE 10y ago
      I remember having VPS-like setup over 10 years ago for cheap, on FreeBSD using jails.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      No, AWS was not unique. It became well-known because a) Amazon had the money to pump into marketing it, and Amazon was already a strong brand and b) aggressive integration of additional non-hosting services like S3 and Route53 made it a simple one-stop shop. They had the brand credit to get enterprise clients on the hook. As the rest of this thread is stating wrt DSC, the success is really only slightly related to the technology.
chewmieser 10y ago
Digital Ocean wasn't around before AWS, but yes, VPS's were a thing before AWS. Cloud services weren't nearly as complex though, usually only offering VPS's and not much more. Edit: other guy beat me to this. Either way I agree that AWS wasn't integral to DSC's success.
vacri 10y ago
What were you scaling with in 1996?
- goldenkey 10y ago
  Floppy disks and dollar bills. Also known as Benja-MinMaxing.
danielhooper 10y ago
> Dollar Shave Club was nothing but a marketing success. The tech has absolutely nothing to do with it. Cute narrative attempt, I guess. Is this not how it usually plays out?
- goldenkey 10y ago
  It is but the author was implicating tech as a grand departure from it.

sixhobbits 10y ago

EC2 was released in 2006. Digital Ocean was founded in 2011.

goldenkey 10y ago
Okay thanks. I will remove digital ocean, my mistake. Linode and Slicehost I have used for many many years though so I'm sure those are correct.
- sixhobbits 10y ago
  I wasn't really in the cloud world in 2006, but AFAIK EC2 was pretty inventive/original/game changing in that it allowed anyone to immediately fire up and use VPS. Although there were (small) exiting services, these had enterprise entry level requirements, where you had to be approved as a customer before hand, provide all code that you wanted to run on their machines, and contact humans on the provider's end in order to up/down scale. Open to correction.
  - goldenkey 10y ago
    Linode and other hosts have had online billing since their inception. You could always launch a VPS on linode in seconds. Even shittier hosts like HostGator or Dreamhost never required human contact to launch new servers. EC2 was game changing for certain reasons but what you mention sbout 'enterprise' was never an issue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode
  - TylerE 10y ago
    I remember having VPS-like setup over 10 years ago for cheap, on FreeBSD using jails.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    No, AWS was not unique. It became well-known because a) Amazon had the money to pump into marketing it, and Amazon was already a strong brand and b) aggressive integration of additional non-hosting services like S3 and Route53 made it a simple one-stop shop. They had the brand credit to get enterprise clients on the hook. As the rest of this thread is stating wrt DSC, the success is really only slightly related to the technology.

chewmieser 10y ago

Digital Ocean wasn't around before AWS, but yes, VPS's were a thing before AWS. Cloud services weren't nearly as complex though, usually only offering VPS's and not much more. Edit: other guy beat me to this. Either way I agree that AWS wasn't integral to DSC's success.

vacri 10y ago

What were you scaling with in 1996?

goldenkey 10y ago
Floppy disks and dollar bills. Also known as Benja-MinMaxing.

danielhooper 10y ago

> Dollar Shave Club was nothing but a marketing success. The tech has absolutely nothing to do with it. Cute narrative attempt, I guess. Is this not how it usually plays out?

goldenkey 10y ago
It is but the author was implicating tech as a grand departure from it.