Comment by vkazanov
11 hours ago
Ehm. Shared hosting was a thing since forever. VPS also existed.
Linode definitely had something along those lines.
Amazon won on APIs and overall integration but VMs were around already.
I remember the story really well as this is when i joined the workforce as a young GNU/Linux fan.
It was pretty regional back then, when I got VMs for clients we used UK providers (ElasticHosts maybe?).
Also people are throwing AWS start date of 2006, but AWS only really started catching on around 2008/2009 if I remember correctly. EC2 came out of beta late 2008, and EBS was only launched around the same time.
I don't think it even officially launched S3 until 2008, which is what all people really used it for initially for cheap remote backups.
It definitely took a while to get good. There was also a period where having 'noisy neighbours' impact VM performance was often discussed here. You didn't tend to have that same problem on the other VM hosts as people were using the VMs for hosting with generally low CPU usage, not for compute.