Amazon Web Services marked 20 years in 2026, having launched its first major cloud services in 2006. It is a cloud services provider rather than a web host in the conventional sense, but it underpins a great deal of what you would call hosting: compute, storage, databases and content delivery that other companies build their sites and products on.
You might be unable to purchase a shared hosting plan directly from the online giant, but, more likely than not, you already have used services running on Amazon Web Services.
Netflix, Reddit, AOL, and Pinterest are some of the most popular names hosted on Amazon servers.
Even GoDaddy, the largest web hosting provider in the world, allied with AWS and moved the majority of its infrastructure to it. For the scale of the market that decision sits in, see our web hosting statistics.
But what makes Amazon Web Services such a huge success?
For success, it is.
- AWS reported $128.7 billion in net sales for 2025, up 20% year over year, with fourth-quarter growth of 24%, its fastest in 13 quarters.
- AWS held 28% of the worldwide cloud infrastructure services market in Q2 2026, ahead of Microsoft at 20% and Google at 15%. That quarter the market passed $143 billion, with generative AI demand the main driver of growth.
- Netflix, Quora, NASA, Reddit, and a great many other large sites run on AWS.
- Its share has slipped as rivals grew, but AWS has led the cloud infrastructure market for two decades. Our cloud computing statistics track how the three big providers compare.
To get stunned by other outrageously stupefying numbers, check out the visual narrative below about the meteoric rise to world domination of AWS:
