Sep 29
Amazon is making an infrastructure play that will rule the web.
Web 1.0 was all about buying 100 servers and having your own techs in data centers. How big was your rack? Companies today are moving to VPS providers like Slicehost. VPS have a fantastic role in providing hosting for your small to medium site (like this one). But what about if you want to build the next facebook? One of the presenters at Amazon’s AWS event “The Start-up Project” showed us this chart:
Pretty scary! This is daily pageviews as a percentage of total pageviews on the internet. As you can see, facebook just destroys CNN and Flickr. Amazon AWS tries to answer the question: How do I scale like facebook!
The alternative to Amazon AWS
One alternative to Amazon is to buy space in a data center and fill a rack with servers in anticipation of users. This is a lesson that was learned by one of the guys in Betahouse at a previous startup. They bought a bunch of servers for customers that never came. What a great way to burn money! The other alternative is to try and scale using VPS providers like slicehost. You’re going to hit some technical difficulties pretty quickly and have to solve the problems amazon already has.
Amazon provides a solution for starting small and scaling big if and when you need it. How many other companies let you pay for 10 extra servers for only 8 hours during peak time in the US when everyone is at the office? If you know others that do, let me know!
I’ll dive into some of the various technologies in later articles. For now, you need to know that you can build a site to take over the world and your starting cost will be $72 a month + data transfer.
Want to win some money using AWS?
Check out “The Startup Project“. Amazon is offering some cold hard cash for companies to use their services.
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