Comment by ascorbic

raises hand I ran a small SaaS business in the early 2000s, pre-AWS.

Renting dedicated servers was really expensive. To the extent that it was cheaper for us to buy a 1U server and host it in a local datacenter. Maintaining that was a real pain. Getting the train to London to replace a hard drive was so much fun. CDNs were "call for pricing". EC2 was a revelation when it launched. It let us expand as needed without buying servers or paying for rack space, and try experiments without shoving everything onto one server and fiddling with Apache configs in production. Lambda made things even easier (at the expense of needing new architectures).

The thing that has changed is that renting bare metal is orders of magnitude cheaper, and comparable in price to shared hosting in the bad old days.