What Is AWS — How Amazon Went from Selling Products to Powering the Internet
The Amazon Story: From Books to Ruling the Internet
In 1994, Jeff Bezos rented a garage and started selling books online. The idea was simple: an online store without the limits of physical shelves. No one could have imagined that, 30 years later, that garage company would control a third of all internet traffic on the planet.
Today, Amazon isn’t just the world’s largest online store. It is, in parallel, the world’s largest internet infrastructure provider. And this second business — Amazon Web Services (AWS) — is the one generating the highest profits.
How AWS Was Born: An Internal Problem Turned Into a Business
In the early 2000s, Amazon was growing so fast that its own servers couldn’t keep up. The engineering team built a massive infrastructure to handle millions of orders. Then came the question: if we’ve already built all this computing power, why not sell it to others?
In 2006, AWS officially launched. The idea was revolutionary: instead of buying physical servers, you rent them from Amazon, pay only for what you use, and shut them down when you no longer need them. Like renting a house by the hour instead of building one.
Amazon Today: Two Empires Running in Parallel
The Product Empire
Amazon remains the world’s largest online retailer. Millions of products, next-day delivery, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Kindle. The business everyone knows.
The Server Empire (AWS)
But behind the curtain, AWS is the engine powering a massive portion of the internet. Netflix runs on AWS. Spotify runs on AWS. NASA, Airbnb, Samsung, BMW — they all use Amazon’s servers.
AWS holds around 31% of the global cloud computing market. For comparison, Microsoft Azure has roughly 25%, and Google Cloud about 11%. Amazon leads by a wide margin.
What Services AWS Offers (Explained Simply)
S3 — File Storage
Think of an infinitely large cabinet where you can put anything: images, documents, videos, backups. You only pay for the space you use. That’s Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). It’s where millions of websites and apps store their files.
CloudFront — Content Delivered Fast Anywhere in the World
If your website is hosted on a server in Frankfurt, a visitor from Japan will wait longer for the page to load. CloudFront solves this: it copies your site’s content to hundreds of servers around the world. The visitor receives files from the closest server. The result: maximum speed, regardless of location.
EC2 — Virtual Servers on Demand
Instead of buying a physical server worth tens of thousands of euros, you rent a virtual one from Amazon. You start it in 60 seconds, configure it however you want, and shut it down when you no longer need it. You pay by the hour.
Route 53 — The DNS System
This is the phone book that translates your website address (sitemodern.ro) into the actual server address where it lives. Fast, reliable, and integrated with the rest of the AWS ecosystem.
Certificate Manager — Free SSL
The SSL certificate (the green padlock in your browser) is included for free with AWS. You activate it with one click, it renews automatically, and you never have to worry about it expiring.
Why This Matters for Your Website
You don’t need to be Netflix to benefit from AWS. The same technologies powering the world’s largest platforms can also power your business website or online store:
- Speed: files load from the server closest to your visitor.
- Security: free SSL, DDoS protection, bank-grade certified infrastructure.
- Availability: if one server goes down, another takes over automatically. Your site stays up.
- Scalability: if you have 100 visitors today and 10,000 tomorrow, the infrastructure adapts on its own.
What We Do at Site Modern with AWS
Every website we build uses Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Specifically: files are stored on S3, delivered through CloudFront (global CDN), with free SSL via Certificate Manager and DNS managed through Route 53.
The result: websites that load in under a second, secured at enterprise level, and running 24/7 without interruption. The same infrastructure used by Netflix and Spotify, but for your business.
Amazon didn’t just change the way we shop. It changed the way the internet works. And today, that power is accessible to any business.
Want a Website Built on the Best Infrastructure?
Contact us for a free analysis. We’ll show you what a website built on AWS looks like and what difference it makes compared to traditional hosting.