"Virtual private servers changed this. You could spin up a server in minutes, resize it on demand, and throw it away when you were done. DigitalOcean launched in 2011 ..."
The first VPS provider, circa fall of 2001, was "JohnCompanies" handing out FreeBSD jails advertised on metafilter (and later, kuro5hin).
These VPS customers needed backup. They wanted the backup to be in a different location. They preferred to use rsync.
Four years later I registered the domain "rsync.net"[1].
Pre-2000, it wasn't exactly useful as a hosting environment as such, but there were plenty of people renting unix shells by the month. We'd use screen and nohup to leave services running while logged out.
The first VPS provider, circa fall of 2001, was "JohnCompanies" handing out FreeBSD jails advertised on metafilter (and later, kuro5hin).
These VPS customers needed backup. They wanted the backup to be in a different location. They preferred to use rsync.
Four years later I registered the domain "rsync.net"[1].
[1] I asked permission of rsync/samba authors.