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In addition: long before AWS you could easily rent virtualized or dedicated servers. It took longer to provision than EC2 and all you had for storage is a fixe

In addition: long before AWS you could easily rent virtualized or dedicated servers. It took longer to provision than EC2 and all you had for storage is a fixed amount of disk, but that was absolutely sufficient for many businesses.

_hcuq 5y ago
I still use them. Easier than fiddling with AWS.
- post-it 5y ago
  The biggest thing for me is no surprise bills. Sure, it's pretty unlikely that a t2.small instance and its associated storage and network subscriptions are going to produce a $1000 bill one day, but there's literally no way to set a hard cap on billing so clearly Amazon thinks it might be possible.
  - phonon 5y ago
    Use https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ then...
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ludjer 5y ago
      At that point you might as well go with vps. Lightsale is way more expensive and the underlying architecture is way more unstable I have a 1% failure rate for my fleet of instances. Ever two weeks I have a instance is not responding and needs to be rebooted alert from aws.
manigandham 5y ago
Definitely more process involved, but the requirements were also simpler compared to sprawling modern architectures. I think the overall effort is similar, but was slower due to the speed of communications and paperwork at that time. Getting hard assets is a core part of business in basically every industry, so I found it strange to claim that it was some major obstacle just because it happened to be servers instead of trucks or factory equipment.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  I can only speak for the last 15 years or so, but any time I rented virtual or dedicated servers the experience was basically the same as ordering a book from Amazon: you create an account, select what you want and how you want to pay, the next day you have an email with IP and credentials. Of course since then things have improved and you can now expect your sever to be provisioned within minutes, along with a nice dashboard to manage it. It's a bit more involved if you want to build your own server and put it in colocation somewhere, mostly because that involves being physically present.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Well speaking about the last 15 years, so 2007 to today, for me it was the same as modern clouds - register, add a credit card, order a server, few minutes later the root password arrives in e-mail. And oldschool LAMP webhosting is basically serverless cloud. Edit: Actually I remember using actual cloud provider back in 2008 - it was called Virtualmaster, one of the first cloud providers in central EU. They offered a free (!) VPS with 256 MB RAM and 1/4 CPU - I had a minimalist Debian image that allowed me to run full LAMP stack on it and an IRC client in tmux session. Another cool central EU provider was 4smart. Their offering used to be that you only paid for resources you actually used - but for VMs. If you consumed only 10MB RAM, you only paid for that. I had servers cheaper than 1 EUR/month running continuosly with their own IPv4 there. They changed the pricing structure after few years.
    - chromaton 5y ago
      Linode was founded in 2003.
yellowapple 5y ago
Hell, it still is sufficient for many businesses.
vmception 5y ago
> but that was absolutely sufficient for many businesses. yes, but I am glad about how many job titles are obsoleted for many businesses due to how compute instances are managed. much smaller organizations used to need a full blown database administrator or two, and other personnel dedicated to keeping the server up. or you were doing it all yourself and spending your time on that. much higher barrier of entry than today where you have an untold number of computers spun up for you in an instant and a bunch of cached versions on yet more computers in the CDN and another process keeping those caches updated, with you just thinking its one single instance used because you're on the hobby plan.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Honestly, it didn't seem to be that different back then than it is now. When I worked at smaller places, developers handled infrastructure and development. As the company grew, dedicated specialists came onboard to help. Today, at smaller places, developers handle the cloud infrastructure, and as the company grows, they bring on dedicated specialists to help. The biggest difference, I think, is that we have so many specialized products. We are no longer trying to figure out how to make a shoehorned relational DB scale, instead we start with a database designed for specific workloads.
whiplash451 5y ago
OVH has a great dedicated server offering. Definitely a great bang for the buck compared to AWS (if you can handle the downsides of course: security, backup, setup, handled by yourself).
- post-it 5y ago
  > OVH Emphasis on backup.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    And definitely keep it outside of OVH.
    - whiplash451 5y ago
      Indeed. You can use glacier for that. Cheap and efficient.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
> In addition: long before AWS you could easily rent virtualized or dedicated servers. I disagree with this statement. Yes, you could rent, but not by the hour and based on compute power, and couldn't rent extra storage again by the hour and by the GB. Plus, you couldn't interact with these "virtual servers" through APIs. I was at AWS 2008-2014 (early days!), and I think you should consider the impact of the "on-demand", API-by-default, nature of the AWS offering. Oh, and don't forget that with a valid credit card you could be up and running in literally minutes, not weeks. Back then AWS had decent performance, but it was pretty bad when compared to more traditional Colo offerings; but in regards to the above aspects it dominated the scene, undisputed. IMHO, that's what gave AWS most of the initial traction.
- lsaferite 5y ago
  >> In addition: long before AWS you could easily rent virtualized or dedicated servers. > I disagree with this statement. Your disagreement here is without merit. You are talking about facets that were never even mentioned by the GP. If you wanted to list those things off as why the previous situation was suboptimal, fine, do that. But how can you disagree with a (presumably) completely factual statement?
- GordonS 5y ago
  > Yes, you could rent, but not by the hour and based on compute power, and couldn't rent extra storage again by the hour and by the GB Right - because it's so cheap you don't need to rent by the hour.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Think of the case we might have at my company: we occasionally need a load of GPUs to train a new ML model. We spin up some beefy VMs with stonking great GPUs, churn away for a while, and then spin them down with our new ML model ready to go.

_hcuq 5y ago

I still use them. Easier than fiddling with AWS.

post-it 5y ago
The biggest thing for me is no surprise bills. Sure, it's pretty unlikely that a t2.small instance and its associated storage and network subscriptions are going to produce a $1000 bill one day, but there's literally no way to set a hard cap on billing so clearly Amazon thinks it might be possible.
- phonon 5y ago
  Use https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ then...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ludjer 5y ago
    At that point you might as well go with vps. Lightsale is way more expensive and the underlying architecture is way more unstable I have a 1% failure rate for my fleet of instances. Ever two weeks I have a instance is not responding and needs to be rebooted alert from aws.

manigandham 5y ago

Definitely more process involved, but the requirements were also simpler compared to sprawling modern architectures. I think the overall effort is similar, but was slower due to the speed of communications and paperwork at that time. Getting hard assets is a core part of business in basically every industry, so I found it strange to claim that it was some major obstacle just because it happened to be servers instead of trucks or factory equipment.

wongarsu 5y ago
I can only speak for the last 15 years or so, but any time I rented virtual or dedicated servers the experience was basically the same as ordering a book from Amazon: you create an account, select what you want and how you want to pay, the next day you have an email with IP and credentials. Of course since then things have improved and you can now expect your sever to be provisioned within minutes, along with a nice dashboard to manage it. It's a bit more involved if you want to build your own server and put it in colocation somewhere, mostly because that involves being physically present.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Well speaking about the last 15 years, so 2007 to today, for me it was the same as modern clouds - register, add a credit card, order a server, few minutes later the root password arrives in e-mail. And oldschool LAMP webhosting is basically serverless cloud. Edit: Actually I remember using actual cloud provider back in 2008 - it was called Virtualmaster, one of the first cloud providers in central EU. They offered a free (!) VPS with 256 MB RAM and 1/4 CPU - I had a minimalist Debian image that allowed me to run full LAMP stack on it and an IRC client in tmux session. Another cool central EU provider was 4smart. Their offering used to be that you only paid for resources you actually used - but for VMs. If you consumed only 10MB RAM, you only paid for that. I had servers cheaper than 1 EUR/month running continuosly with their own IPv4 there. They changed the pricing structure after few years.
  - chromaton 5y ago
    Linode was founded in 2003.

yellowapple 5y ago

Hell, it still is sufficient for many businesses.

vmception 5y ago

> but that was absolutely sufficient for many businesses. yes, but I am glad about how many job titles are obsoleted for many businesses due to how compute instances are managed. much smaller organizations used to need a full blown database administrator or two, and other personnel dedicated to keeping the server up. or you were doing it all yourself and spending your time on that. much higher barrier of entry than today where you have an untold number of computers spun up for you in an instant and a bunch of cached versions on yet more computers in the CDN and another process keeping those caches updated, with you just thinking its one single instance used because you're on the hobby plan.

mywittyname 5y ago
Honestly, it didn't seem to be that different back then than it is now. When I worked at smaller places, developers handled infrastructure and development. As the company grew, dedicated specialists came onboard to help. Today, at smaller places, developers handle the cloud infrastructure, and as the company grows, they bring on dedicated specialists to help. The biggest difference, I think, is that we have so many specialized products. We are no longer trying to figure out how to make a shoehorned relational DB scale, instead we start with a database designed for specific workloads.

whiplash451 5y ago

OVH has a great dedicated server offering. Definitely a great bang for the buck compared to AWS (if you can handle the downsides of course: security, backup, setup, handled by yourself).

post-it 5y ago
> OVH Emphasis on backup.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  And definitely keep it outside of OVH.
  - whiplash451 5y ago
    Indeed. You can use glacier for that. Cheap and efficient.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

> In addition: long before AWS you could easily rent virtualized or dedicated servers. I disagree with this statement. Yes, you could rent, but not by the hour and based on compute power, and couldn't rent extra storage again by the hour and by the GB. Plus, you couldn't interact with these "virtual servers" through APIs. I was at AWS 2008-2014 (early days!), and I think you should consider the impact of the "on-demand", API-by-default, nature of the AWS offering. Oh, and don't forget that with a valid credit card you could be up and running in literally minutes, not weeks. Back then AWS had decent performance, but it was pretty bad when compared to more traditional Colo offerings; but in regards to the above aspects it dominated the scene, undisputed. IMHO, that's what gave AWS most of the initial traction.

lsaferite 5y ago
>> In addition: long before AWS you could easily rent virtualized or dedicated servers. > I disagree with this statement. Your disagreement here is without merit. You are talking about facets that were never even mentioned by the GP. If you wanted to list those things off as why the previous situation was suboptimal, fine, do that. But how can you disagree with a (presumably) completely factual statement?
GordonS 5y ago
> Yes, you could rent, but not by the hour and based on compute power, and couldn't rent extra storage again by the hour and by the GB Right - because it's so cheap you don't need to rent by the hour.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Think of the case we might have at my company: we occasionally need a load of GPUs to train a new ML model. We spin up some beefy VMs with stonking great GPUs, churn away for a while, and then spin them down with our new ML model ready to go.