[einpoklum]

> And AWS started because they already had the servers for holiday surge capacity.

That doesn't seem very likely. There's a limit to how much server work you need to handle one online shopping website.

[Bedon292]

That is what I had read or heard at some point. The majority of their business was in the holiday season, and needed several multiples of servers to handle it. So in say May, 80% of the machines were sitting basically idle. So why not rent them out.

Unfortunately I appear to have been mislead by a myth: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...

So, thanks for calling that out. Would have gone on believing it otherwise.

[c22]

What is the limit? It seems reasonable to me that it might change based on number of users, frequency of transactions, amount of user engagement, etc. After all, non-shopping websites have to scale with these metrics.