3 ms·

Definitely more process involved, but the requirements were also simpler compared to sprawling modern architectures. I think the overall effort is similar, but

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.

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.