My little old hosting business lived and died on this particular hill, I just didn't realise what was happening at the time. When we grew up in the early 2000s

My little old hosting business lived and died on this particular hill, I just didn't realise what was happening at the time. When we grew up in the early 2000s, our bigger sales usually featured complicated stacks. They had redundant load-balancing, redundant firewalls, way more than many customer never needed. (But they did ask for it). The failover often cost more in management complexity than it saved when a box died in the "right" way to trigger the planned failover event. We sold ourselves on cleverness when people asked for that. It worked to grow our business to 30 staff, a data centre in our home city, life was good! We responded to AWS with an API-based cloud hosting platform. But sales still peaked in 2012. Customers wanted even more complex solutions than the ones we were selling - partially or wholly based on AWS. But - we figured - the hardware we were buying was hugely powerful compared to 10 years previously, and sites weren't that much more complicated. The bigger customers would (surely!) want fewer, less complicated boxes as a result. Unfortunately that is not selling on cleverness, that is selling on price. We never understood the financial ambition needed for that pviot. Nobody trusted a single cheap server, and even if they bought two, where was the scalability? It worked enough to keep revenue flat, but we obviously couldn't compete on building managed service stacks and software ecosystems quicker than Amazon. When the new technical challenges had long dried-up, we sold in 2018. My thinking (and so most of the company's product design) came from being bootstrapped where the possibility of an uncapped hosting bill seemed like an insane risk to take. Who would take it? (wait - what - why was everyone taking it??!) AWS are embedded not just because VC makes their high-priced products feasible, but because their particular brand of cleverness is embedded in a generation of software developers. It obviously works! But the knowledge of when you might not need their cloud (or what the alternatives could ever be) feels quite a niche thing now.