Hanzo Archives Limited, also known as Hanzo, was founded in 2005 by a team of software entrepreneurs and archivists with a goal to archive the World Wide Web—which currently exceeds well over 5,000,000 terabytes and over 100,000,000 web sites.
A self-funded startup with big aspirations, Hanzo has an endless task of collecting data from the web and storing it in a browsable and searchable archive. With an infinite amount of web data to store, Hanzo researched co-location and virtualization options. But many of these options did not provide the scalability Hanzo needed to achieve its goal of indexing the World Wide Web. When Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the beta launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in August 2006, Hanzo got excited.