Right, but we've had that since the start of the web. I get that Serverless is not a very good name, but there's a reason why it was coined now - it was meant to describe a particular kind of service that appeared recently. If we're going to apply it backwards to any web hosting service where the host was not explicitly managed, the term becomes much less useful.
> If we're going to apply it backwards to any web hosting service where the host was not explicitly managed
But that's the thing - there is no "the host" any more. In the days of yore, if the physical machine hosting your site failed, your site went down. Maybe some rare services had failover and redundancy to some degree, but they were primitive at best compared to AWS (and the other serverless providers, for that matter) today. There was simply no comparison to the ecosystem that exists today. Have you ever had to manage production hosts before? It simply boggles my mind how many people throw out these "the cloud is just somebody else's computer" comparisons - like they've never had to diagnose JVM garbage collection thrashing at 3 in the morning before, or dealt with a server that goes down due to 100% of disk space being consumed by logs, or patch a massive fleet in a matter of hours in response to a CVE, or a power outage, or a hyper-localized network event in a data center, or any of the other million+ super annoying problems that come with managing physical hosts, and to a large degree, VMs/VPSes.
I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me :) my point is exactly that: what AWS et all are offering now is not like what we used to have, so we should use the term "serverless" for stuff we already had, like fully-managed static sites.
Ha, I thought I was disagreeing, but having gone back and re-read just now, I realize I must have misread because, yes, I agree with you 100%. I was also partially expressing general grist at the naivetë of some of the other commenters.
