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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 wi
by 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 agoI 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 agoYou 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 agoTrue, 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 agoRead highscalability's Youtube story.
- aorloff 9y agoJust 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 agoThe percentage of businesses that have explosive growth is very small. Most have gradual growth and can easily be managed by just manual monitoring.