"When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. I can't imagine it would have taken more than a h

"When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. I can't imagine it would have taken more than a handful of Google-style shipping crates to host the site." If you're talking about when EC2 first started (2006), then I think you underestimate Amazon's scale by a couple orders of magnitude. For example, it's been a long time since Amazon has had "their datacenter" rather than many large datacenters around the world. [Note: I was an Amazon employee from 2005 to 2008.] Consider that Amazon had $10 billion in revenue in 2006, (how many pageviews does it take to end up with that many orders?) and has a lot of very complex processing under the hood (over 200 distinct services called just to render the home page; search and recommendation engines; payments; inventory control; fraud detection; etc.). Then you can start to estimate just how much infrastructure they require.