[LrnByTeach]

> say the average American today spends $600/month total on owning a car. Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month? No, they'd go for an initial price of $400/month for a couple of years to get customers, then sneak back up to $600/month once they've caught most of the market.

In year 2000, in order to run a medium web site as a company you need 2 Servers one for each Database, WebServer. People bought each server box for $5000 and server capacity used is only at 15%

Come to 2012, Amazon AWS charged for the same Servers only $40/month . Amazon know It costs lots for website owners, why they offer all the server capacity for $40 ???

[beojan]

> People bought each server box for $5000 and server capacity used is only at 15%

So why do they need 2 servers?

Also, I'm pretty sure VPSes and shared hosting were available in 2000.

[shiftpgdn]

VPSes did not exist as a commercial product in 2000. Back then you likely purchased and colo'd your hardware or leased from a provider. You could get shared hosting with CGI access but that was about it.

[fps]

Shared hosting (with PHP, mod_perl and SSI) was available from thousands of providers for between $5 and $25/month. SSL required a dedicated IP, because SNI wasn't a thing yet, and so if you wanted an SSL enabled site, you were looking at closer to $100/month. But that was for managed, shared hosting, typically with access to a database and automated backup. Good enough for most businesses small-ish web presences.

Rackspace offered dedicated servers for $150/month and up. Smaller providers would rent you a server in their datacenter for around $60/month. I used a company called sagonet in the early 2000s that is still in business and still offering a similar service for about $30/month: http://www.synergyisp.com/dedicated-servers/

Most larger companies at the time contracted with a colocation provider and purchased servers for between $1000 and $4000 each, and paid in the neighborhood of $1000/month for a rack, or $500/month for a half rack, including power and network.

This was monumentally cheaper than the AWS based stack we have these days, though - no company with any complexity to their website has a $40/month AWS bill. A company with a similar SAAS offering to what I ran in 2001 for $40K up front and $500/month is probably looking at a $5000/month AWS bill at today's rates.

[oblio]

Are cars comparatively cheaper than in the Model T era?

[dagw]

I think a Model T was about $22k-$25k in today's money.

[oblio]

So parent's logic, as I was expecting, doesn't necessarily apply. We just started wanting more from our cars, we didn't necessarily make them cheaper. There are very cheap cars but most would consider them death-traps...

I imagine a self-driving car packs a ton of servers, I'm not sure it can be cheaper than your average mid-range car...