VKontakte has a new owner. VKontakte: history, success, known and little-known facts
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Which social network is the most popular in Russia and the CIS? Even people far from this topic will say that this is VKontakte! This site will be 10 years old in the fall of 2016.
his popularity grew steadily among both young people and the older generation. In this article we will look at the history of its formation and many interesting facts about VKontakte.The most noteworthy events in the history of VKontakte
The official birthday of VKontakte is considered to be October 10, 2006. At that time, the site was positioned as a social network for students of individual Russian universities.
This is what VKontakte looked like in 2006 Already in 2007, open registration became available. Moreover, each user was required to indicate real data and post a real photo. For many Internet users of that time, this was unusual, because the main platform for communication were forums where anonymity was preferred. However, Durov managed to accustom the public to posting information about himself..
Even at the beginning of its formation, VK began to receive complaints and even lawsuits for plagiarism and piracy, but this did not prevent the further development of this
social network
In less than six months, VKontakte was able to overtake Odnoklassniki in terms of traffic, and by the end of 2007, more than a million users had already registered on it.
Among the notable events of 2009 was the purchase of the vk.com domain.
How much it cost is not known. It is worth noting that distributors of child pornography, Internet scammers and other guys who used the social network clearly for no good began to be actively imprisoned.
By the way, in the period 2009-2010, the application “Happy Farmer” was gaining popularity on VKontakte, which to this day occupies the minds of children and adults. Even Zhirinovsky is delighted with him!
The year 2010 was remembered for the introduction of the ability to receive SMS messages about new events in VK. Then it became known that part of the social company belongs to Mail.Ru Group. Users were very outraged by the replacement of the usual “wall” with a microblog: the site simply exploded with “Durov, bring back the wall!” . By the end of the year, the number of VKontakte users exceeded 100 million, although a considerable percentage of pages were fake. In the same year, there was a rapid increase in fraud through VK. This is what the familiar wall looked like
The end of January 2011 was marked by a high-profile trial regarding a VKontakte user who posted several audio recordings on his page. About 200 thousand people downloaded them, which caused enormous damage and moral suffering to the copyright holder.
A notable event occurred on February 11, 2011, when, in an attempt to combat spammers and the creation of fake pages, VK management introduced registration by invitation. By the way, not all users could send invitations. In general, this year security was improved, changes were made to privacy settings, clients were released for Android and iPhone, and it became possible to use hashtags in posts.
In 2012, there were no too significant events related to VKontakte. The site developed, a video call function appeared, and testing of the targeting system began.
One of the saddest years for users was 2014, when Pavel Durov was forced to leave the post of director, and he also left the country. Why? I wouldn’t like to go into politics, but it was related to the events in Ukraine. No, Pasha did not support either side - he simply protected the data of his users... Although today they say that he has already returned to the Russian Federation. Meanwhile, Mail.Ru Group has completely taken over the most popular social network.
The year 2015 was remembered mainly for constant failures in the website. Many users believed that this was all because Pasha was kicked out.
The year 2016 was to some extent significant for VKontakte users, because for the first time in many years a large-scale change in the site’s design was announced. Not everyone received the redesign positively, but VK management believes that sooner or later they would have come to something similar. New design has become fully adaptive to all types of devices.
Today, the average daily number of visitors to VKontakte is about 80 million.
What ensured success?A friendly and simple interface, the gradual addition of new features, a focus on ease of use - all this largely determined the formation of VKontakte. The advantage of the site at the end of the 2000s was the presence of a lightweight WAP version, which greatly pleased numerous users with weak mobile Internet.
It is generally accepted that it was word of mouth that determined the rapid growth in the popularity of VKontakte. Indeed, the overwhelming number of users came there after learning from their friends and acquaintances about such a new interesting site. But no matter what they say, a competent advertising company also played a role. This is where we needed cash
Mirilashvili cheats. And a lot was invested, because VK’s management could afford to reward the most active promoters with Apple products. VKontakte is convenient on all devices VKontakte today is very attractive in terms of organization advertising companies
. A well-developed targeted service will allow you to attract attention to your product or service from precisely those users who are interested in it.
On top of everything else, VKontakte is a clone of the successful Facebook, which was not even particularly hidden. The American social network was leaked down to some elements of the source code.
Our website also has a public page on VKontakte. You can view it by clicking on the button below. The most Interesting Facts
Pasha was considered an intelligence agent
The social network VKontakte has definitely changed the lives of ordinary Russians. Some will say for the better, others say for the worse. However, it should be remembered that VKontakte is just a tool, and we ourselves decide how to use it, and it cannot influence us in any way!
Every day more than 60 million people from different countries around the world visit one of the most popular social networks - VKontakte. Who created this project and how did it happen? Considering that the history of the creation of the service itself deserves attention, we invite you to travel back a few years and see where it all began and what path preceded such enchanting success. And the emergence of VKontakte is closely connected with the name of one of the most prominent figures among representatives of the new generation of entrepreneurs - Pavel Durov.
Despite the fact that the fame of Durov’s main project brought him enormous fame, there is not much information about the creator of the best social network on the Runet.
ChildhoodThe one who created the VKontakte network was born in Leningrad (modern St. Petersburg) on October 10, 1984, in the family of the famous Soviet philologist Valery Semenovich Durov, author large quantities scientific works.
For several years, Durov Sr. and his family lived in where the head of the family worked. It was there that Pavel began going to school. Upon returning to his native Petersburg, he continued his studies at a regular school, but not for too long - too often he had to point out to the teachers their incompetence, which the boy could not accept. However, an alternative was found quite quickly - a whole group was recruited into the experimental classes of the Academic Gymnasium, such as Durov Jr.
During his school years, Pavel sat at the first desk, often alone, received high scores and was considered a very erudite child, but the “stars” of the class - winners of various Olympiads - overshadowed him. Nikolai, Durov's older brother, a talented scientist, also won competitions in computer science and mathematics.
Immediately after graduating from high school, Pavel Durov, following in his father’s footsteps, entered St. Petersburg State University, the Faculty of Philology, and graduated in 2006. During his student years, the one who created the social network VKontakte did not go with the flow like most students, but actively used the time for self-improvement and development.
A key moment in the entrepreneur’s biography was approaching - the emergence of VKontakte. You already know who created this one. However, few people know that even before its appearance, while studying at the university, Pavel worked on several predecessor projects. One of them is the site durov.com, which did not have any commercial benefit, but helped students who studied and lived in different areas of the northern capital to exchange opinions and ideas online.
However, soon Pavel let the work of durov.com take its course and turned his attention to a new project - the university forum spbgu.ru, starting to promote it. First of all, Durov created a portal to the faculties' platforms, then he began to initiate verbal battles, registered under different nicknames and argued with himself, and in real life he organized beauty and design contests. Meanwhile, the forum’s attendance reached 3,000 people per day, and the resource began to be enriched with new social functions. Users were able to blog, raise or lower each other's ratings. Pavel was especially careful about monetization, not allowing banners not related to education to appear on the site.
By the end of his training, Durov was firmly convinced that he needed to study own projects, and not translations from English, as indicated in the diploma. By the way, he never took the diploma himself, so as not to have to deal with the bureaucracy once again.
We continue to study the biography of the one who created the social network. VKontakte network. Against the backdrop of his other ideas, Durov had long been thinking about implementing such a project, where all people could act under real names. Just at this turning point in his mailbox It turned out to be a letter from a person with whom Pavel lost contact 7 years ago - Vyacheslav Mirilashvili. A student at the prestigious American Tufts University saw how social networks were rapidly gaining popularity and pitched the idea to an old friend.
If they had started a little later, the chances of success would have been significantly lower. In the spring of 2006, the number of users on domestic social networks continued to grow, but even the audience of the leader, the Odnoklassniki website, barely reached 500,000 people.
Vyacheslav did not have his own funds to launch the project. He had to borrow them from one of his father’s companies, Mikhail Mirilashvili, the owner of the St. Petersburg casinos “Conti” and the shopping and entertainment complexes “PetroMir”. Mirilashvili Sr. is one of the most famous businessmen of the northern capital of the 90s and is believed to be a good friend of President Vladimir Putin.
Friends founded a company in which Vyacheslav remained, and his friends Pavel Durov and Lev Leviev became members. Durov was not at all embarrassed by the fact that the project could be associated with someone else’s name. But he retained for himself a block of voting shares sufficient to veto objectionable decisions.
On October 1, 2006, a key event occurred - the company registered the domain vkontakte.ru. This day is considered the birthday of VKontakte. Now you know who created this site. It's time to talk about the development of the project itself.
At first, the site was closed, and registration was possible only by invitation. Registration was allowed only for those who indicated their real first and last name. Students from the capital's universities vied with each other to persuade each other to register, and in just a few days in November, the newly launched social network attracted more than 2,000 users. And the main motive was participation in a competition, which, again, was invented by Pavel Durov - the one who created the VKontakte website. To those who were able to invite greatest number friends, an original and expensive gift for that time was promised - a real iPod.
Just 3 months later, free registration was introduced, and the rapidly growing number of participants in the social network prompted the organizers to switch to more powerful servers and actively improve the system.
Now you know how the social network VKontakte appeared, who created it and continued to develop it. These days, the site is constantly changing and improving. It can be said without exaggeration that VKontakte has become a whole world for those who love to communicate, find new friends, listen to music, watch videos, play games, read news and interesting notes.
In Belarus this is the second most visited site, in Ukraine and Kazakhstan it is the third.
The founders of the site are Russian programmer Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai Durov.
Pavel is also the creator and co-owner of such well-known student projects as Durov.com (a site aimed at humanities students) and SPBGU.RU (a forum for students of St. Petersburg State University).
Start of a large-scale project
On the Durov.com website in the summer of 2006, many users saw the following news message:
“After a long period of development, my new project for students has been opened, which many have asked about - “VKontakte.ru”. The project will allow students and graduates from a variety of universities and faculties to always stay in contact.
This is a technologically sophisticated database of profiles of students and alumni, where we will be united based on places of study, friendships, interests, etc.
The picture shows my page.
Yours sincerely,
Pavel Durov".
This was the “first sign” about VKontakte, and shortly after that the site was assigned Domain name vkontakte.ru (October 1, 2006), and this date is considered to be the founding date.
But the real “Birthday” was October 10 of the same year - it was on this day that the first functions of the site began to work.
Why VKontakte?
The site was conceived as a way to support communication between students and former graduates of different universities in the country.
It could be called “Student.ru”, but sooner or later students finish their studies and lose contact with those with whom they studied for many years.
And it was decided that everyone should be “in contact,” that is, in touch. Everyone liked the name (except Durov himself, oddly enough), and now it has almost become a brand.
History of the site in facts and figures
In November 2006, free user registration was opened. Previously, it was possible to get here only by invitation of already registered participants.
January 2007 - “VKontakte” is one of the 50 fastest growing sites on the Internet.
September 27 of the same year - “VKontakte” took third place among the most visited sites in Russia (only Mail.ru and Yandex failed to overtake).
In the same 2007, the site took second place in the popular vote for the Runet Award (losing primacy to the entertainment site bash.org.ru).
February 2008 - “VKontakte” became available in Ukrainian, and at the end of March of the same year, the site’s audience exceeded 10 million people.
July 2008 - 15 millionth member registered.
In 2009, the number of users is growing rapidly, and VKontakte is ahead of its main competitor, the Odnoklassniki website.
2010 is full of innovations. In April: a new design style “Pre-Revolutionary” was introduced (with the ability to disable); it becomes possible to change the “VKontakte” status via SMS; On April 17, the site launched its own payment system; two days after this, VKontakte launches testing of the OpenID service.
May brings such innovations as the ability to attach audio and video files to personal messages, and the “Fans” function becomes available again.
In my opinion, the most memorable events of the past year were the celebration of the fourth birthday of Pavel Durov’s creation (October 10), and the resonance due to the transfer of all user pages to microblog mode without the ability to disable it.
As I remember, this happened on the evening of October 20, and literally by the morning of October 21, a riot was brewing; many users instantly created protest groups and threatened to boycott the site. After a few days, the microblog could be turned off at will or left as is.
February 2011 - the daily audience of VKontakte exceeded 23 million visitors. Further - more, today it is already 25 million.
Site owners
For a long time there was not a word about this. The Vesti newspaper conveyed the following information to readers: the founders of VKontakte LLC are Vyacheslav Mirilashvili (60%), Mikhail Mirilashvili (10%), Pavel Durov (20%) and Lev Leviev (10%).
Pavel Durov denied this information, and the site’s press service stated that the investors in VKontakte are the Digital Sky Technologies fund.
Not without criticism 
He is accused of allegedly creating a clone of the equally famous social network Facebook.
To such statements, Pavel Durov only responds that he became familiar with the principles of social networks using the example of Facebook, but adapted his own website to the domestic education system.
Pavel Durov is a programmer, founder of the largest Russian-language social network VKontakte and its director from 2006 to 2014.In 2007, Pavel Durov won the competition for the best young entrepreneurs of the year in the Delovoy Petersburg newspaper. By 2011, Pavel’s capital was estimated at 7.9 billion rubles. Durov took 350th place in the ranking of the richest people in Russia. The cost of the social network Vkontakte by this time was estimated at one and a half billion dollars.
In 2013, he introduced the Telegram messenger with unique encryption technology to users. After being removed from his post as head of VKontakte in 2014, he left Russia and continued to develop Telegram.
Childhood and education Pavel Valerievich Durov was born on October 10, 1984 into an intelligent Leningrad family. Durov’s father, Valery Semenovich, is a Doctor of Philology, head of the Department of Classical Philology, Faculty of Philology, St. Petersburg State University. Nikolai Valerievich, the elder brother of Pavel Durov, twice became the absolute world champion in programming among students. 
Pavel went to school in Turin, where his father worked for several years. Soon the family returned to Russia, and, after studying for a short time at a comprehensive school, Pavel entered the Academic Gymnasium at St. Petersburg State University.
Durov studied in a class with in-depth study of four foreign languages. I sat at the first desk due to vision problems. From the age of 11 I was interested in programming, and together with my brother I created my first programs.
His school antics related to hacking are known computer networks: Pavel, out of boredom, changed the screensavers on all the computers in the computer science classroom and easily cracked the passwords that the teachers came up with.
After graduating from the Academic Gymnasium with honors, Durov entered the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University (specialty “English Philology and Translation”).
In general, Pavel Durov is distinguished by a passion for languages: “Teach foreign languages. This will unrealistically expand the depth of perception of the world and open up unprecedented prospects for training, development and career growth,” he once gave this advice to readers on his VKontakte page. It also lists the languages that Pavel Durov speaks: in addition to English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, he knows Latin and Persian.
While studying at the university, he repeatedly won competitions in linguistics, programming and design, was a scholarship recipient of the Government of the Russian Federation, the President of the Russian Federation, became a Potanin Prize laureate for three years in a row, was trained at the military faculty in the specialty “Propaganda and Psychological Warfare”, was a platoon commander Faculty of Philology. Graduated military training with the rank of reserve lieutenant. In 2006, he completed his studies at the Faculty of Philology with honors, which he still has not taken from the university.
Creation of VKontakte While still a student, Durov began collecting a database with educational materials for students of humanities faculties, which was located at durov.com. He wanted to unite fellow students scattered across different buildings using a resource convenient for virtual communication - this is how the spbgu.ru forum was born. Personal account each user included columns with first and last name, faculty, list of friends and groups, as well as the ability to blog. To promote the site, Durov organized intra-university beauty and design competitions. 
One day, his old friend Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, who studied in the States, wrote to Durov. He watched the rapidly growing popularity of social Facebook networks and shared his findings with Pavel. Together they discussed the idea of creating a Russian-language social network. Money for the project was borrowed from Vyacheslav’s father. The founders of the company were Pavel Durov and his friend Lev Leviev with Vyacheslav.
In September 2006, the social network VKontakte was launched. Appearance its founders borrowed from the brainchild Mark Zuckerberg. Nikolai Durov helped the budding entrepreneurs, who took upon himself the optimization of the load on the servers.
Interview with Pavel Durov
At first, registering on VKontakte was possible only by invitation, but already in December 2006 the site became open to all users. During the first year of operation, the number of VK users grew by three million. To attract new users, the site’s management organized competitions, such as “We’ll give an iPod to the person who brings the most friends.”
Despite minimizing costs, the new project vitally needed investments to support servers, especially since Contact at that time did not know advertising and was a completely non-profit project. The first investor in VKontakte was Yuri Milner and his Digital Sky Technologies fund, which bought 25% of the shares of the social network for $6.3 million and subsequently sold them to Mail.ru Group.
However, it was impossible to delay the commercialization of the site. In 2007, VKontakte users had the opportunity to increase their ratings and give gifts to friends for virtual currency- “voices”. Two years after the site was launched, the first banners for contextual advertising. By that year, the site had already become a leader in traffic in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, and the number of users reached 20 million.
Pavel rented the top two floors of the famous Singer House on Nevsky Prospekt, where the main office of VKontakte moved.
Since December 2011, Durov has taken an active part in financing startups selected on a competitive basis. The first six selected startups received $25 thousand from Durov. At the beginning of January 2012, Pavel donated $1 million for the development of Wikipedia.
In November 2012, Nikolai Kononov’s documentary book “The Durov Code” was published, dedicated to the development of VKontakte. The rights to film the book were immediately acquired by AR Films. Pavel has an extremely negative attitude towards the film adaptation, however, despite his disapproval, the film's release was scheduled for the end of 2017.
In 2012, the singer Sergey Lazarev, concerned about the large volume of pirated content on Russia’s largest social network, announced his intention to sue VKontakte. After this, Durov wrote on Twitter that all Lazarev’s songs had been removed from VK, which only increased the cultural value of the site. For some time, when trying to play any of the singer’s compositions, users received a message: “The composition has been removed from public access due to lack of cultural value.”
His “corporate war” with one of the main shareholders of Vkontakte, the Mail.ru Group, is known, which in 2011 sought to absorb the social network and merge it with the Odnoklassniki website. In 2012, a conflict also broke out between VKontakte and the management of the Vedomosti newspaper, related to one of the site’s innovations, which allows you to view news from third-party resources without clicking on an active link.
Shareholder conflict between Pavel Durov and UCP In 2011, Dmitry Grishin, the newly appointed director of Mail.ru Group (formerly DST), which also owned the social network Odnoklassniki, announced to Durov his intention to buy out 100% of the shares of VKontakte and merge it with Odnoklassniki ", as well as bring VK shares to an IPO, that is, offer them for purchase to a wide range of people. Later it became known that the amount of the potential transaction exceeded $2 billion, if we count the Facebook shares Mail.ru had instead of $1.1 billion.A week after the negotiations between the two “whales” of the RuNet, Durov posted on Instagram a photo of himself with his middle finger stuck out. The indecent gesture was accompanied by the caption: “The official response to the trash holding Mail to its latest attempts to absorb VKontakte.”
Due to the failed deal, Durov subsequently quarreled with his partners – Mirilashvili and Leviev. They sold their stakes in the social network (40% and 8%) to the investment fund UCP (United Capital Partners), without notifying either Durov or the Mail Group. Pavel insisted that the deal was illegal, since under Russian law, before selling his shares, the shareholder is obliged to offer to buy them out to other shareholders.
In turn, the UCP was unhappy that Durov was wasting time and money on personal projects, namely, on the Telegram messenger, launched in August 2013. Durov himself claimed that he developed the messenger with personal funds. The founder of VKontakte was sued for embezzlement of funds. A counterclaim followed: Durov sued the founder of UCP Ilya Sherbovich, accusing him of buying out shares of Telegram LLC and Digital Fortress LLC behind his back with the help of his partners with the further intention of blackmailing him into exchanging these shares for half of Telegram shares. Both sides subsequently withdrew their claims.
Soon after this, Durov sold the remaining stake (12%) of VKontakte shares to Megafon CEO Ivan Tavrin. Experts estimated the transaction value from $200 million to $400 million. A couple of months later, Tavrin sold the acquired shares of Mail Group, which ultimately became the owner of 52% of the company.
On April 1, 2014, Pavel Durov on his VKontakte page announced his resignation from the post of general director “due to changes in the shareholder composition.” It turned out that on March 21 he submitted his resignation of his own free will. A little later, he explained that the information was a hoax and that he would not leave his post, so easily betraying everything he had done for the site.
On April 16, Durov spoke about the demands of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation to hand over data to the organizers of the Euromaidan community and block the anti-corruption community Alexey Navalny"Rozpil." Durov refused both demands.
On April 21, Durov learned of his dismissal from the media. It turned out that the board of directors of VKontakte found errors in the application for the rollback of the previous application (about leaving at his own request on March 21), and therefore he was automatically removed from his position. “Today VKontakte is coming under full control Igor Sechin And Alisher Usmanova. Probably, in Russian conditions something like this was inevitable, but I’m glad that we lasted 7 and a half years,” he concluded.
Soon Durov left Russia, taking with him a team of 12 programmers, bought citizenship of the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and Nevis and does not intend to return to his homeland until at least 7 conditions are implemented in Russia. Among them: open courts, elimination of contradictions between laws (deregulation), open elections for leadership positions, maximum taxes on the raw materials sector with the abolition of VAT, economic sovereignty of the regions, reforms of the education system and the “abolition of feudal remnants” such as military service and the cult of registration.
Criticism of Durov Many of Durov’s eccentric actions and statements are subject to harsh criticism. A wave of angry articles hit him after the action of throwing airplanes with banknotes from the window of his office. Bloggers and journalists call this act of Durov “a merchant’s whim,” and Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky spoke even harsher: “A citizen who treats his people like cattle should get the profession of a seamstress-machine operator in the zone.”Flying money by Pavel Durov
On the eve of Victory Day on May 9, 2012, Durov again turned RuNet against himself with a statement on Twitter: “67 years ago, Stalin defended from Hitler the right to repress the population of the USSR.” Many bloggers and public figures sharply condemned this post and deleted their VKontakte accounts, and Sergey Minaev called Durov “scum.” Later, Vladislav Tsyplukhin, at that time the press secretary of VKontakte, said that Durov respects Victory Day, and the post on Twitter is connected with the fact that his grandfather, who went through the entire Great Patriotic War, Patriotic War, was later repressed.
"Pavel Durov" hit a traffic inspector
In 2013, the founder of VKontakte allegedly hit a police officer with his car. A video has appeared on the Internet in which a man similar to Pavel Durov violates traffic rules, runs over an inspector, and then flees the scene of an accident. It is noteworthy that this story happened precisely at a time when the spheres of influence were being redistributed among the shareholders of Russia’s largest social network.
Personal life of Pavel Durov A little more than nothing is known about the personal life of Pavel Durov. A number of rather “yellow” media cited excerpts from documents from the St. Petersburg registry office, according to which Durov is the father of two children (born in 2009 and 2010), whose mother is journalist Daria Bondarenko, who graduated from the history department of St. Petersburg State University. The VKontakte press service called this information “tabloid gossip”; Durov himself put it more harshly: “And then I went nuts when I found out this.” 
Those who knew Durov even before his wealth and popularity claimed that he once actually dated Daria, but the couple did not have any children.
Pavel Durov now. Telegram versus Roskomnadzor After leaving VKontakte, Pavel Durov began developing Telegram, which, according to various estimates, cost him up to $12 million a year to maintain. 
In May 2017, Durov came into conflict with Roskomnadzor. The head of the department, Alexander Zharov, did not rule out blocking the messenger on the territory of the Russian Federation due to the refusal of Durov, known for his libertarian views, to cooperate with the authorities and provide them with data for registering the messenger, the very concept of which implied complete anonymity of correspondence, for the safety of which Durov feared.
After the refusal, Telegram was hit by an information attack. The largest federal channels aired stories in which Telegram was directly called the main communication channel of terrorists, and FSB representatives stated that the terrorist attack in the St. Petersburg metro was coordinated using the messenger. Businessman Oleg Tinkov called Durov a “cattle”, pointedly deleted Telegram from his smartphone and promised money to those who would follow his example.
On June 28, Durov nevertheless provided data for registering Telegram in the Russian Federation, but expressed hope that it would not come to providing encryption keys or user data. Otherwise, Pavel said, there will be no cooperation.
A new round of confrontation between Telegram and the Russian authorities began in April 2018. On the 13th, the court decided to block the messenger for refusing to give the FSB encryption keys, which, according to Durov, are in principle impossible to provide to anyone. technical reasons due to software specifics. On April 16, Roskomnadzor began blocking. Pavel refused to cooperate with the authorities and posted a photo on Instagram on a white horse with the comment: “To be free, you must risk everything for freedom.”
After several days, Telegram was still available to most users. In an attempt to destroy the messenger, Roskomnadzor blocked more than 20 million IP addresses, which led to disruptions in the operation of many large services based on cloud hosting Amazon and Google.