Surprised no one has mentioned AWS yet. Anyone who remembers procuring, racking and imaging physical servers knows how utterly incredible it is create a cloud VM. And probably a good 20X improvement to use a value add cloud service like S3 or Netlify.
+1000 to this. At my first startup after college (~2000-2002), I remember clearly our first "deployment" for a paid customer -- we had to order $thousands in Sun SPARC machines, rent a rack at a local data center, hire someone to set it all up, etc. etc. etc.
I don't think people appreciate what an absolute miracle the various cloud providers are. I'd say it was 100x - 1000x improvement, not just 10x.
>, but hosting providers were around long before AWS.
Yes but AWS exposed a programmable web api to provision servers and disk. You download an SDK and get a AWS developer key and then could create S3 buckets for storage and EC2 instances.
Yes, hosting datacenters like Rackspace in 2003 existed but you had to talk to a human or send an email to provision compute resources. There wasn't a "Rackspace web SDK".
The Amazon AWS that made "cloud" more acceptable was such a paradigm shift that both Google and Microsoft didn't have a competitive offerings of GCP & Azure for more than a year. AWS has kept its lead from the very beginning.
And the console. They set the standard for self-service. It's the most sophisticated enterprise software platform in the world and you can bootstrap without talking to a salesperson. That was pretty revolutionary.
Their software defined networking & virtualization was a big deal too. Many of the primitives of on-prem or "LAN" networking were translated into the cloud.
As someone working as a web developer for a smaller company, I don't get the use case for AWS. Super confusing naming of their services and nontransparent pricing.
For the vast majority of people some 5 Dollar hosting is more than they need. Just copy your files to the server. Does not get simpler.
And if you need more, it is super easy to set up a dedicated server these days anyway.
$5 hosting is absolute not enough for most big businesses. The times I've actually gone for simpler solutions, they're usually built on AWS (ie Heroku or Netlify)
I never said anything about big business. It is fine for a small Wordpress Blog and the like. Not everyone is Google. Lot's of small and medium sized businesses.
