3 ms·

Virtual servers are a thing since ... forever on the Internet. At least since mid-nineties you had not to think about getting hard drives into servers, if you w

• Macha 5y ago
  VPSes were usually not cost effective either if what you wanted was a big pool of storage space. The big growth opportunity for S3 was the companies that would otherwise run their own SANs, not the startup that was going to run on a couple of VPSes or shared hosting otherwise. Even the startups that grew, they might start on a VPS provider, but outgrow them. S3 managed to scale with them and retain them as customers.
• acdha 5y ago
  Yes, and that's like saying that you don't understand why people eat at restaurants when there's field full of cauliflower. If you're comparing it to S3, using virtual servers means you're now taking on responsibility for configuring, operating, and securing replicated file storage in at least 3 geographically separated regions, scaling it when you start to fill up those local disks, building an API on top of that, and providing web-based access. Don't forget things like bitrot detection and prevention, storage encryption, centralized logging, event-based triggers, lifecycle management policies, tiering onto cheaper storage either by policy or automatically. For many organizations, the 24x7 staffing needed to provide an equivalent service alone would pay for their entire storage cost multiple times over. Even if your scale is sufficient to allow beating that, you are likely to have more compelling problems for that time to be spent on. (This is not saying that the egress charges are great, only that I completely understand why many, many people decided it was an acceptable tradeoff)