The Business Glossary · Hosting & Cloud

Abuse case: the record of an abuse report and its mitigations, reusing the user-generated platforms abuse desk tables (moderation_cases, reports, abuse_mitigations) pointed at resources instead of content (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Abuse reporters: security researchers, brands, blocklists, mailbox providers, rights holders and other providers, who need a working abuse contact, an acknowledgment and action on evidence (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Account: the contracting customer that agrees to the terms, pays and holds standing, and the tenant every row carries; a reseller's customer is an account whose parent is the reseller (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Add-ons and upsells: extras sold to existing customers on top of a plan, such as privacy, backups, security scanning, email, dedicated IPs and support tiers (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
AWS Billing Conductor: the AWS channel partner tool of billing groups, pricing plans, rules and custom line items that produces pro forma cost data with markups or discounts without changing the actual AWS invoice (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Carriers and their registries: mobile and wireline carriers, The Campaign Registry and the toll-free and short code administrators, who want registered senders and carrier fees per message, and fine traffic that breaks the rules (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
CAs and root programs: certificate authorities and the browser and operating system vendors that decide which CAs to trust, who require validation to the Baseline Requirements, logged certificates and automated renewals (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Ceiling (permissions): a deny-only limit on an organization unit or the account that overrides any allow binding beneath it, since a deny anywhere above wins, the evaluation AWS documents for SCPs (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Cloudflare tenant: the Cloudflare partner container holding customer accounts and zones, provisioned through the Tenant API, whose tenant admins are Super Administrators of every account inside (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Colocation and interconnection: the provider segment of data center operators such as Equinix, selling space, power, cross-connects and interconnection to the providers above them (The Provider Landscape).
Commitments: a spend or usage commitment by a larger customer for one to three years in exchange for a discount, with a shortfall charged if usage falls short (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Communications platforms: the provider segment selling numbers, texts, calls and email by the unit, with carrier fees passed through, from CPaaS vendors to email senders (The Provider Landscape).
Credit and commitment (records): money the customer may draw down (credit_grants) and money it promised to spend (commitments), netted against rated usage at invoice time (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Credits and free tiers: promotional, referral and startup credits that draw down usage, paid for by nobody directly because they are a cost of acquisition (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Developer clouds: the provider segment (DigitalOcean, Akamai's Linode, Vultr, Hetzner, OVHcloud) selling VMs, managed Kubernetes and databases and object storage at simpler prices than the hyperscalers (The Provider Landscape).
Edge networks: the provider segment selling caching, TLS, DDoS mitigation, WAF and bot management and edge compute in front of the customer's origin (The Provider Landscape).
Effective dating: giving every price version, plan version, quota and identifier assignment a closed-open TSTZRANGE, so usage is rated at the price in effect when it happened (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
End users: the visitors, recipients and callers who reach the customer's site, inbox or phone number, and need pages that load, mail that arrives, texts they asked for and no fraud (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
European providers: the provider segment (OVHcloud, Hetzner, IONOS, plus the hyperscalers' sovereign offerings) selling dedicated servers, cloud and hosting with EU residency as a selling point (The Provider Landscape).
Google Cloud billing subaccount: a billing account intended for resellers and paid by a parent billing account on invoiced billing, alongside the Cloud Channel API for distributors, resellers and customer entitlements (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Hold: a dated restriction on an account (account_holds) for non-payment, abuse, fraud or a sanctions match; standing is the holds in force, and accounts.status is only a cache of them (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Hold cascade: the rule that a reseller's non-payment hold applies to every sub-account it bills (cascade_to_sub_accounts), while an abuse hold on one sub-account never reaches the reseller or its other customers (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, selling every layer from bare metal to managed AI in dozens of regions, metered by the second and the request (The Provider Landscape).
Identifier: a name or address a resource holds over time (IP, hostname, domain, phone number), held rather than owned, with an exclusion constraint so no two resources hold it at the same instant (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Invoice and payment: the Payments volume's invoice, invoice line, payment and ledger tables, linked to accounts, subscriptions and rated usage rather than rebuilt for hosting (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
ISV under 10DLC: the texting reseller model in which an ISV registers each of its customers as a separate texting brand, ideally through a secondary customer profile and a brand per customer (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Marketplaces (cloud): provider storefronts where software vendors sell to the provider's customers, paying a listing fee on every sale through the marketplace (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Metered usage: per-second, per-request, per-gigabyte or per-message charges rated from usage records, the main way developers and businesses pay clouds and communications platforms (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP): Microsoft's partner program in which a direct-bill partner or an indirect reseller buying through a distributor sells licenses and Azure at partner prices, administering through granular delegated admin privileges the customer grants (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Organization unit: a grouping of scopes (AWS OUs, Azure management groups, Google Cloud folders) used for policy and ceilings, never for payment (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
PaaS and frontend clouds: the provider segment (Vercel, Netlify, Heroku, Render, Fly.io, Railway, Cloudflare Workers) selling deploys from git, functions and managed runtimes, metered on CPU, memory and requests (The Provider Landscape).
Pass-through fees: money collected from customers for the layer below (registry and ICANN fees per name-year, carrier fees per message, license fees per account), marked as its own SKU so the provider's revenue stays separable (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Payer: the party that signs the contract, gets the invoice and holds standing; in this volume the account, which is also the tenant (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Person or workload: whoever acts on an account: human users through memberships with roles, workloads through service principals with credentials; neither is the account, which outlives every member (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Plan: a packaged offer of SKUs with included allowances and a term, versioned, and carrying the intro and renewal amounts the customer bought (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Plans with included usage: a monthly fee that includes an allowance of usage, then metered overage or a pause once the allowance runs out (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Prepaid subscriptions with intro terms: a plan bought for one to four years upfront at an introductory rate that renews at a higher list price, the web host's core model (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Price: the price of a SKU in a price book and currency over a period (price_versions); a price change is a new version with notice, never an edit (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Product and SKU: what is sold, and each billable unit of it with its meter (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Project: a scope inside an account for resources, permissions and quotas: a cloud project or member account, a subscription, a team project or a hosting account (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Provider versus underlay: the split that almost every provider resells someone else's layer, as a PaaS runs on a hyperscaler's regions, a host on a cloud, a registrar on a registry and a texting platform on carriers (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
regions.underlay: the column naming the cloud, colocation operator or customer site a region runs on, so status, incident and residency answers can be generated (The Provider Landscape).
Registrar reseller: a reseller selling registrations through a registrar's accreditation, usually white-label, under an agreement that must identify the sponsoring registrar, which stays responsible for its conduct (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Registries and ICANN: the TLD operators and ICANN, which accredits registrars and sets consensus policy, who need their fees per name-year, contract compliance and abuse handling (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Resellers and partners: agencies, WHM and registrar resellers, managed service providers, cloud channel partners and ISVs, who need a wholesale price, sub-accounts they control and their own brand on the bill (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Resource: anything running or held (a server, VM, cluster, function, database, bucket, site, domain, certificate, phone number), kept in one resources table plus side tables per kind (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Scope: the container that holds resources, permissions, quotas and budgets (an AWS member account, an Azure subscription, a Google Cloud project, a cPanel account); in this volume the project (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Secret scanning partner program: GitHub's program that lets a provider register its token formats and receive a payload when one appears in a public repository, so the provider can revoke or quarantine the leaked key (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
skus.pass_through: the flag marking registry, ICANN, carrier, license, regulatory and marketplace-vendor fees, so the provider's own revenue and margin are separable (The Provider Landscape).
Subscription: an account's commitment to a plan for a term, renewing, recorded with its periods and whether each was an intro or a renewal term (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Subscription versus resource versus usage: the split that matters most in the data model: what the customer agreed to pay for a term, the thing that exists, and what it did, each changing on its own schedule (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Underlay suppliers: data center operators, hardware and chip vendors, network carriers, the hyperscaler under a PaaS and software licensors, whose fees are often passed through and whose terms bind the provider (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Usage: raw measurements as received (usage_events) and their priced result (rated_usage), kept as two tables so a pricing bug can be fixed by rerating (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Usage ingestion: idempotent, append-only intake of meter events, each carrying the producer's idempotency key unique per source, so a replay is a no-op and corrections arrive as new events (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Web hosts: the provider segment selling shared, VPS and managed WordPress hosting bundled with domains, email and site builders (The Provider Landscape).
WHM reseller: a reseller holding a share of a cPanel server with account, disk and bandwidth limits, grouped privileges and its own nameservers, while the server owner ultimately answers for the server and its IPs (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Who pays versus what runs: the split that one contracting customer pays for many projects, a reseller for many customers it bills itself, and each project holds many resources, so the bill never hangs on the resource (The Hosting & Cloud Business).

Abuse case: the record of an abuse report and its mitigations, reusing the user-generated platforms abuse desk tables (moderation_cases, reports, abuse_mitigations) pointed at resources instead of content (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Abuse reporters: security researchers, brands, blocklists, mailbox providers, rights holders and other providers, who need a working abuse contact, an acknowledgment and action on evidence (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Account: the contracting customer that agrees to the terms, pays and holds standing, and the tenant every row carries; a reseller's customer is an account whose parent is the reseller (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Add-ons and upsells: extras sold to existing customers on top of a plan, such as privacy, backups, security scanning, email, dedicated IPs and support tiers (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
AWS Billing Conductor: the AWS channel partner tool of billing groups, pricing plans, rules and custom line items that produces pro forma cost data with markups or discounts without changing the actual AWS invoice (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Carriers and their registries: mobile and wireline carriers, The Campaign Registry and the toll-free and short code administrators, who want registered senders and carrier fees per message, and fine traffic that breaks the rules (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
CAs and root programs: certificate authorities and the browser and operating system vendors that decide which CAs to trust, who require validation to the Baseline Requirements, logged certificates and automated renewals (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Ceiling (permissions): a deny-only limit on an organization unit or the account that overrides any allow binding beneath it, since a deny anywhere above wins, the evaluation AWS documents for SCPs (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Cloudflare tenant: the Cloudflare partner container holding customer accounts and zones, provisioned through the Tenant API, whose tenant admins are Super Administrators of every account inside (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Colocation and interconnection: the provider segment of data center operators such as Equinix, selling space, power, cross-connects and interconnection to the providers above them (The Provider Landscape).
Commitments: a spend or usage commitment by a larger customer for one to three years in exchange for a discount, with a shortfall charged if usage falls short (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Communications platforms: the provider segment selling numbers, texts, calls and email by the unit, with carrier fees passed through, from CPaaS vendors to email senders (The Provider Landscape).
Credit and commitment (records): money the customer may draw down (credit_grants) and money it promised to spend (commitments), netted against rated usage at invoice time (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Credits and free tiers: promotional, referral and startup credits that draw down usage, paid for by nobody directly because they are a cost of acquisition (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Developer clouds: the provider segment (DigitalOcean, Akamai's Linode, Vultr, Hetzner, OVHcloud) selling VMs, managed Kubernetes and databases and object storage at simpler prices than the hyperscalers (The Provider Landscape).
Edge networks: the provider segment selling caching, TLS, DDoS mitigation, WAF and bot management and edge compute in front of the customer's origin (The Provider Landscape).
Effective dating: giving every price version, plan version, quota and identifier assignment a closed-open TSTZRANGE, so usage is rated at the price in effect when it happened (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
End users: the visitors, recipients and callers who reach the customer's site, inbox or phone number, and need pages that load, mail that arrives, texts they asked for and no fraud (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
European providers: the provider segment (OVHcloud, Hetzner, IONOS, plus the hyperscalers' sovereign offerings) selling dedicated servers, cloud and hosting with EU residency as a selling point (The Provider Landscape).
Google Cloud billing subaccount: a billing account intended for resellers and paid by a parent billing account on invoiced billing, alongside the Cloud Channel API for distributors, resellers and customer entitlements (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Hold: a dated restriction on an account (account_holds) for non-payment, abuse, fraud or a sanctions match; standing is the holds in force, and accounts.status is only a cache of them (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Hold cascade: the rule that a reseller's non-payment hold applies to every sub-account it bills (cascade_to_sub_accounts), while an abuse hold on one sub-account never reaches the reseller or its other customers (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, selling every layer from bare metal to managed AI in dozens of regions, metered by the second and the request (The Provider Landscape).
Identifier: a name or address a resource holds over time (IP, hostname, domain, phone number), held rather than owned, with an exclusion constraint so no two resources hold it at the same instant (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Invoice and payment: the Payments volume's invoice, invoice line, payment and ledger tables, linked to accounts, subscriptions and rated usage rather than rebuilt for hosting (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
ISV under 10DLC: the texting reseller model in which an ISV registers each of its customers as a separate texting brand, ideally through a secondary customer profile and a brand per customer (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Marketplaces (cloud): provider storefronts where software vendors sell to the provider's customers, paying a listing fee on every sale through the marketplace (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Metered usage: per-second, per-request, per-gigabyte or per-message charges rated from usage records, the main way developers and businesses pay clouds and communications platforms (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP): Microsoft's partner program in which a direct-bill partner or an indirect reseller buying through a distributor sells licenses and Azure at partner prices, administering through granular delegated admin privileges the customer grants (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Organization unit: a grouping of scopes (AWS OUs, Azure management groups, Google Cloud folders) used for policy and ceilings, never for payment (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
PaaS and frontend clouds: the provider segment (Vercel, Netlify, Heroku, Render, Fly.io, Railway, Cloudflare Workers) selling deploys from git, functions and managed runtimes, metered on CPU, memory and requests (The Provider Landscape).
Pass-through fees: money collected from customers for the layer below (registry and ICANN fees per name-year, carrier fees per message, license fees per account), marked as its own SKU so the provider's revenue stays separable (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Payer: the party that signs the contract, gets the invoice and holds standing; in this volume the account, which is also the tenant (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Person or workload: whoever acts on an account: human users through memberships with roles, workloads through service principals with credentials; neither is the account, which outlives every member (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Plan: a packaged offer of SKUs with included allowances and a term, versioned, and carrying the intro and renewal amounts the customer bought (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Plans with included usage: a monthly fee that includes an allowance of usage, then metered overage or a pause once the allowance runs out (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Prepaid subscriptions with intro terms: a plan bought for one to four years upfront at an introductory rate that renews at a higher list price, the web host's core model (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Price: the price of a SKU in a price book and currency over a period (price_versions); a price change is a new version with notice, never an edit (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Product and SKU: what is sold, and each billable unit of it with its meter (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Project: a scope inside an account for resources, permissions and quotas: a cloud project or member account, a subscription, a team project or a hosting account (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Provider versus underlay: the split that almost every provider resells someone else's layer, as a PaaS runs on a hyperscaler's regions, a host on a cloud, a registrar on a registry and a texting platform on carriers (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
regions.underlay: the column naming the cloud, colocation operator or customer site a region runs on, so status, incident and residency answers can be generated (The Provider Landscape).
Registrar reseller: a reseller selling registrations through a registrar's accreditation, usually white-label, under an agreement that must identify the sponsoring registrar, which stays responsible for its conduct (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Registries and ICANN: the TLD operators and ICANN, which accredits registrars and sets consensus policy, who need their fees per name-year, contract compliance and abuse handling (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Resellers and partners: agencies, WHM and registrar resellers, managed service providers, cloud channel partners and ISVs, who need a wholesale price, sub-accounts they control and their own brand on the bill (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Resource: anything running or held (a server, VM, cluster, function, database, bucket, site, domain, certificate, phone number), kept in one resources table plus side tables per kind (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Scope: the container that holds resources, permissions, quotas and budgets (an AWS member account, an Azure subscription, a Google Cloud project, a cPanel account); in this volume the project (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Secret scanning partner program: GitHub's program that lets a provider register its token formats and receive a payload when one appears in a public repository, so the provider can revoke or quarantine the leaked key (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
skus.pass_through: the flag marking registry, ICANN, carrier, license, regulatory and marketplace-vendor fees, so the provider's own revenue and margin are separable (The Provider Landscape).
Subscription: an account's commitment to a plan for a term, renewing, recorded with its periods and whether each was an intro or a renewal term (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Subscription versus resource versus usage: the split that matters most in the data model: what the customer agreed to pay for a term, the thing that exists, and what it did, each changing on its own schedule (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Underlay suppliers: data center operators, hardware and chip vendors, network carriers, the hyperscaler under a PaaS and software licensors, whose fees are often passed through and whose terms bind the provider (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Usage: raw measurements as received (usage_events) and their priced result (rated_usage), kept as two tables so a pricing bug can be fixed by rerating (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Usage ingestion: idempotent, append-only intake of meter events, each carrying the producer's idempotency key unique per source, so a replay is a no-op and corrections arrive as new events (The Hosting & Cloud Business).
Web hosts: the provider segment selling shared, VPS and managed WordPress hosting bundled with domains, email and site builders (The Provider Landscape).
WHM reseller: a reseller holding a share of a cPanel server with account, disk and bandwidth limits, grouped privileges and its own nameservers, while the server owner ultimately answers for the server and its IPs (Accounts, Organizations & Resellers).
Who pays versus what runs: the split that one contracting customer pays for many projects, a reseller for many customers it bills itself, and each project holds many resources, so the bill never hangs on the resource (The Hosting & Cloud Business).