With NCSA HTTPd I'm pretty sure it was literally the only way to do dynamic things at least initially. Which makes sense for the time period, I mean it's the same basic idea as inetd but for HTTP and with some differing implementation details.

Is the selling point of shared hosting and "serverless" PaaS platforms similar? To an extent it definitely is, but I think another major selling point of shared hosting was the price. For a really long time it was the only economically sane option, and even when cheap low end VPS options (usually OpenVZ-based) emerged, they were usually not as good for a lot of workloads as a similarly priced shared hosting option.

But at that point, we're basically debating whether or not the term "serverless" has merit, and that's not an argument I plan to make. I'm only trying to make the argument that serverless is about the actual abstraction of traditional server machines. Shared hosting is just about having someone else do it for you. These are similar, but different.

Okay. Let's ask Amazon since they invented the term:

> Serverless computing is an application development model where you can build and deploy applications on third-party managed server infrastructure. All applications require servers to run. But in the serverless model, a cloud provider manages the routine work; they provision, scale, and maintain the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider handles several tasks, such as operating system management, security patches, file system and capacity management, load balancing, monitoring, and logging. As a result, your developers can focus on application design and still receive the benefits of cost-effective, efficient, and massively scalable server infrastructure.

Right. And that makes sense. Because again, what we're talking about when we're talking about AWS Lambda is serverless functions. But AWS also uses the term for other things that are "serverless", again, like Aurora Serverless. Aurora Serverless is basically the same idea: the infrastructure is abstracted, except for a database. This effectively means the database can transparently scale from 0 to whatever the maximum instance sizes Amazon supports without a human managing database instances.

That's also the same idea for serverless functions. It's not about whether your application has a "server" in it.