Amazon EC2 at 20: How Two Decades of Cloud Compute Reshape Hosting Choices
Twenty years ago this month, Amazon Web Services launched the EC2 Beta via a blog post by Jeff Barr, offering resizable Linux virtual servers in the cloud, billed by the hour, with a single instance type. That modest beginning, confirmed in AWS’s anniversary note, seeded the modern VPS and cloud hosting market. Today, as AWS marks two decades of EC2, the service spans custom silicon for general-purpose and AI workloads and has expanded into deployment models unimagined in 2006. For European website owners, sysadmins, and hosting buyers, the anniversary is more than nostalgia: it signals where infrastructure pricing, control, and operational risk are heading. This editorial breaks down the verified milestones, the practical impact on hosting decisions, and the tradeoffs buyers should weigh before committing workloads to EC2 or its competitors. Related ServerSpan guide: Cloud Hosting vs. VPS Hosting: What's the Real Difference? . The 2006 Baseline: Hourly Linux Instances and a Si...