[kevindamm]

At a lot of places there wasn't even a redundancy nor backup strategy, so it really was just as simple as registering with a hosting company and ssh+ftp (or cPanel or something like that for what amounted to the managed solutions of the time).

I agree, things before S3 weren't really that different. LAMP stacks everywhere, and developer skills were very portable between different deployments of these LAMP stacks. Single machines didn't scale as much then, but for most small-medium sites they really didn't need to.