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> In fact, prior to Amazon ec2, even Internet businesses required typically the cash to buy/house a server in a data centre which was often thousands of dollars

> In fact, prior to Amazon ec2, even Internet businesses required typically the cash to buy/house a server in a data centre which was often thousands of dollars You seem to imply that shared servers (shell or web) did not exist prior to AWS?

andrewstuart 9y ago
For the stuff that I was building, we always needed enough control of the server to need our own. Perhaps people were building "real web applications" on shared PHP/CGI hosts but my impression was that sort of thing was used for lightweight websites with a submission form. I do recall that there was typically shared PHP hosting. ec-2 changed the game by making complete control over your own server simple, cheap, software controlled. Shared hosting existing before but the ec2 formula was the one that worked.
- badestrand 9y ago
  I think you may have missed that you could rent servers online for a long time. Dedicated or shared, full control and much cheaper than EC2. As far as I know EC2 introduced auto scaling, load balancing and spinning up instances in such a lightweight way. Not a revolution but still nice and necessary steps.
orarbel1 9y ago
EC2 offers scaling up and down the number of instances as you grow or shrink. If you built a website 20 years ago and it exploded in traffic, shared hosting without easy scaling would not be a solution. You would have to plan your growth and pre-order shared instances. Thus making your business cash dependent again without proven growth.
- icedchai 9y ago
  I think you over estimate how many people were online 20 years ago and what the expectations were. You could host a reasonably successful web site on a relatively low end server (say, a Sparc 10) off a T1 line (1.5 megabits) and serve a ton of users. They all had crappy connections and were used to waiting.
- slackingoff2017 9y ago
  You really think business grows so fast that you need instant servers? Google ran for many years on piles of commodity boards and they were expanding pretty fast... The amount of marketing hype around cloud services is insane because all the big tech companies have a vested interest in your renting their platforms. It doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't 15 years ago, just makes it easy.
  - got2surf 9y ago
    True, but it would still take more time/effort/knowledge to spin up your servers on commodity boards. Plus, the level of resources for configuring EC2-like servers, and Heroku-esque preconfigured servers reduce the barrier to entry pretty significantly.
  - amigoingtodie 9y ago
    Read highscalability's Youtube story.
  - aorloff 9y ago
    Just makes it cheaper to get started and automate. But compared to setting up a server and running something on it, modern cloud platforms are about as complex IMO (to do right at least).
- craigvn 9y ago
  The percentage of businesses that have explosive growth is very small. Most have gradual growth and can easily be managed by just manual monitoring.
dboreham 9y ago
They did exist but really weren't used much. AWS was the first place where a joe-developer could dial up a machine to use without a heavy sales process and involving purchasing, legal etc. This all played out slowly though : at first AWS was only used for things like running tests, replacing developer desktop hosted VMWare. It took a few years to get to the point where it was used in the way we are familiar with today. fwiw when AWS (EC2 really) started, Internet/Web services weren't even typically run on x86 hardware or Linux. Solaris, AIX, HPUX et al ruled.
- holoop 9y ago
  This is just not really true. Shared hosting and leased servers were widely available from dozens of providers and very popular back in 2002 when AWS started. Also, FOSS operating systems were very popular for servers back then as well. Sure, bigger players owned lots of servers they sourced from the bigger vendors, but smaller players and upstarts largely did not (and certainly didn't need to).
  - dboreham 9y ago
    You are correct. Somehow my brain transported the launch of EC2 back to around 2000. I _think_ I was conflating it with a similar service that was provided by a company I worked for a the time. Since we were doing on-demand machine provisioning then, I guess over the years my brain has assumed Amazon must have been too. fwiw EC2 wasn't launched as a beta until 2006.
- icedchai 9y ago
  Absolutely not true. I remember getting servers from one of the colo providers in the early 2000's (The Planet, which became EV1 Servers, I think?) This was all available with a credit card, no legal or purchasing department required. AWS didn't launch until 2006, which was actually pretty late in the internet game. x86 Linux hosting was ubiquitous then. If you're talking Solaris, AIX, and HPUX, you're remembering the late 90's...

andrewstuart 9y ago

For the stuff that I was building, we always needed enough control of the server to need our own. Perhaps people were building "real web applications" on shared PHP/CGI hosts but my impression was that sort of thing was used for lightweight websites with a submission form. I do recall that there was typically shared PHP hosting. ec-2 changed the game by making complete control over your own server simple, cheap, software controlled. Shared hosting existing before but the ec2 formula was the one that worked.

badestrand 9y ago
I think you may have missed that you could rent servers online for a long time. Dedicated or shared, full control and much cheaper than EC2. As far as I know EC2 introduced auto scaling, load balancing and spinning up instances in such a lightweight way. Not a revolution but still nice and necessary steps.

orarbel1 9y ago

EC2 offers scaling up and down the number of instances as you grow or shrink. If you built a website 20 years ago and it exploded in traffic, shared hosting without easy scaling would not be a solution. You would have to plan your growth and pre-order shared instances. Thus making your business cash dependent again without proven growth.

icedchai 9y ago
I think you over estimate how many people were online 20 years ago and what the expectations were. You could host a reasonably successful web site on a relatively low end server (say, a Sparc 10) off a T1 line (1.5 megabits) and serve a ton of users. They all had crappy connections and were used to waiting.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
You really think business grows so fast that you need instant servers? Google ran for many years on piles of commodity boards and they were expanding pretty fast... The amount of marketing hype around cloud services is insane because all the big tech companies have a vested interest in your renting their platforms. It doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't 15 years ago, just makes it easy.
- got2surf 9y ago
  True, but it would still take more time/effort/knowledge to spin up your servers on commodity boards. Plus, the level of resources for configuring EC2-like servers, and Heroku-esque preconfigured servers reduce the barrier to entry pretty significantly.
- amigoingtodie 9y ago
  Read highscalability's Youtube story.
- aorloff 9y ago
  Just makes it cheaper to get started and automate. But compared to setting up a server and running something on it, modern cloud platforms are about as complex IMO (to do right at least).
craigvn 9y ago
The percentage of businesses that have explosive growth is very small. Most have gradual growth and can easily be managed by just manual monitoring.

dboreham 9y ago

They did exist but really weren't used much. AWS was the first place where a joe-developer could dial up a machine to use without a heavy sales process and involving purchasing, legal etc. This all played out slowly though : at first AWS was only used for things like running tests, replacing developer desktop hosted VMWare. It took a few years to get to the point where it was used in the way we are familiar with today. fwiw when AWS (EC2 really) started, Internet/Web services weren't even typically run on x86 hardware or Linux. Solaris, AIX, HPUX et al ruled.

holoop 9y ago
This is just not really true. Shared hosting and leased servers were widely available from dozens of providers and very popular back in 2002 when AWS started. Also, FOSS operating systems were very popular for servers back then as well. Sure, bigger players owned lots of servers they sourced from the bigger vendors, but smaller players and upstarts largely did not (and certainly didn't need to).
- dboreham 9y ago
  You are correct. Somehow my brain transported the launch of EC2 back to around 2000. I _think_ I was conflating it with a similar service that was provided by a company I worked for a the time. Since we were doing on-demand machine provisioning then, I guess over the years my brain has assumed Amazon must have been too. fwiw EC2 wasn't launched as a beta until 2006.
icedchai 9y ago
Absolutely not true. I remember getting servers from one of the colo providers in the early 2000's (The Planet, which became EV1 Servers, I think?) This was all available with a credit card, no legal or purchasing department required. AWS didn't launch until 2006, which was actually pretty late in the internet game. x86 Linux hosting was ubiquitous then. If you're talking Solaris, AIX, and HPUX, you're remembering the late 90's...