Whether you’re a beginner to servers or have been using them for years, it seems like the terminology around them is constantly evolving. Technologies fall in and out of favor all the time, and new frameworks become the next big thing that you simply have to know.

It often feels like a little much.

That’s why we’ve started to build out an ultimate dictionary to server terms you should know. We’ll cover as wide a spectrum as we can, as long as it’s relevant to managing, administering, and deploying on servers.

This list isn’t yet complete, and if you’d like to contribute, send terms and definitions to [email protected].

This dictionary is organized into a number of categories to help you find terms and definitions in certain areas of interest. Within the categories the terms are sorted alphabetically.

And now, let’s get into it.

The categories

• Servers
• Web applications
• Administration
• Networking
• Interfaces
• Tools and other applications
• Programming

Definitions

Servers

10X: The newest product from SSD Nodes—a VPS purpose-built to work faster with the performance of NVMe. Read more about the power of our 10X VPS.

Host machine: A large server utilizing a hypervisor to create and control virtual machines.

Hypervisor: A computer on which a hypervisor runs is a host machine. The hypervisor creates and manages the virtual machines and got its name as being the supervisor of the traditional Linux supervisor (the kernel itself).

KVM: The Kernel-based Virtual Machine is what turns a server into a host machine via the hypervisor. KVM is a full virtualization solution that allows the host machine to run many virtual machines concurrently, each with private virtualized “hardware” like network cards, disks, graphics adapters, and more.

NVMe: NVM Express is a new device interface for connecting non-volatile memory (hence NVM) to a machine via the ultra-fast PCI Express (PCIe) bus. NVMe uses different hardware interface and protocol compared to SSD, which dramatically reduces I/O overhead and greatly improves performance. SSD Nodes now offers NVMe-based servers in the form of our new 10X VPS.

Self-hosting: Self-hosting is when you put an application on your server, store the information in your own database, and create your own web experience. Read more.

SSD: A solid state drive. Unlike