Glossary
Accounts and money
Section titled “Accounts and money”Account key
Section titled “Account key”The random 256-bit secret that controls a Gigahost account; there is no email
address or chosen password. ghost stores it in a seed file. See
Accounts and security.
Seed file
Section titled “Seed file”The file that keeps the account key, account.seed: ghost keeps it by
default at ~/.config/ghost/account.seed, and the website’s Create an
account page downloads it. See
Where the seed file is kept.
Account alias
Section titled “Account alias”The short, stable name of an account, such as gh-k3m7p2qa, shown in the
website and support workflows. It grants no authority. See
The three account identifiers.
The deposit memo: a 16-character value derived from the account’s current owner public key, which an MMX payment needs to carry to be credited to the account. See Funding your account.
The native coin of the MMX blockchain, in which Gigahost accounts are funded. See What MMX is.
Deposit
Section titled “Deposit”MMX sent in to the platform’s deposit address with an account’s memo. See Funding your account.
Balance hold
Section titled “Balance hold”The refundable part of your balance that an instance locks for its lifetime, shown as Reserved on the website. See The balance hold.
Protected balance
Section titled “Protected balance”The part of your balance and trial credit that new rentals, upgrades, backups and restores leave for the instances you already run: $5 unless you choose another amount, at least $1. See The protected balance.
SLA tier
Section titled “SLA tier”The level of service an instance was rented with, which sets the multiplier of its SLA credits (1×, 5×, or 20×) and how long its provider’s earnings are held. See SLA credits.
SLA credit
Section titled “SLA credit”What an instance earns while its provider’s host is down, kept for you at that provider. See SLA credits.
Renting
Section titled “Renting”Instance
Section titled “Instance”A virtual machine (VM) you rent on Gigahost, or a container instance. Provider pages call an instance on their host a rental, and the operating system inside it the guest. See Managing instances.
Container instance
Section titled “Container instance”An instance that boots a container image instead of an operating system: a VM of its own with the same sizes, prices, disk, backups and addresses, which can be smaller than a VM. It runs a stock image or an image of your own. See Renting a container instance.
Stock image
Section titled “Stock image”One of the platform’s container images of a Linux distribution, such as Debian or Alpine, which runs the distribution’s own init system and OpenSSH, so a container instance of it is reached over SSH with your keys, like a VM. See Renting a container instance.
Restart policy
Section titled “Restart policy”What happens when a container instance’s process exits by itself: it is started again always, only after a failure, or never, and the instance then stays stopped. See Logs.
Offering
Section titled “Offering”A configuration group and its exact terms (hardware, prices, and SLA) that
the catalog lists, with an ID that starts with of2_. It is not one physical
host. See Offering IDs.
An instance’s vCPUs, RAM and disk. Every host offers one ladder of sizes. See Sizes.
Mid-step
Section titled “Mid-step”A size for more CPU without more memory. Between two sizes of N and 2N vCPUs, from the larger 2-vCPU size upward, a mid-step has 2N vCPUs with the N-vCPU size’s RAM and disk, where the 2N-vCPU size exists: 4 vCPUs with the larger 2-vCPU size’s RAM, 8 vCPUs with the 4-vCPU size’s, and so on. See Sizes.
Home host
Section titled “Home host”A provider’s host behind a home or NAT connection (mode = "home_gateway",
home_gateway in the catalog). Its instances reach the internet through a
hosted gateway. See Home instances: gateway
tiers and
Home mode.
Cloud host
Section titled “Cloud host”A provider’s server with additional public IPv4 addresses
(mode = "cloud_routed", cloud_routed in the catalog), which a router VM on the host routes to its
instances. See Cloud mode.
Router VM
Section titled “Router VM”The VM on a cloud host that routes its public addresses to the instances and meters their traffic. See Cloud mode.
Gateway
Section titled “Gateway”The hosted machine through which a home host’s instance reaches the internet: shared by several instances, or one of the instance’s own. See Connecting and networking.
Gateway tier
Section titled “Gateway tier”How a home instance uses its gateway: shared_bandwidth, high_bandwidth or
shared_ip. See
Home instances: gateway tiers.
Dedicated IP
Section titled “Dedicated IP”A public IPv4 address of the instance’s own: a cloud host’s address, or an
address of its own on a home host’s gateway (shared, or the instance’s own with
high_bandwidth). See
Kinds of public address.
Shared IP
Section titled “Shared IP”A range of ports, TCP and UDP, of a public address that the instance shares with others: a shared gateway’s or a cloud host’s own. See Shared IP and ports.
Providers
Section titled “Providers”A provider’s physical Linux server that the hypervisor agent turns into a provider host, a home host or a cloud host. See Becoming a provider.
Enrollment token
Section titled “Enrollment token”The short-lived, single-use token from your account with which a host enrolls. See Enroll once.
Capacity revision
Section titled “Capacity revision”A capacity Gigahost accepted for a host, recorded with its time and reason; raising a host’s capacity records the next one. See Raise a host’s capacity.
Incident
Section titled “Incident”An actionable warning Gigahost records for a provider’s host, without waiting for a renter to open a support request. See Review incidents.
Payout address
Section titled “Payout address”The one MMX address every payout of a provider goes to. Only a request
signed by ghost can set it. See
The payout address.
Payout hold
Section titled “Payout hold”How long a provider’s earnings are held before they can be paid out: 1, 5 or 20 days by the rental’s SLA tier. See SLA tiers.
Backups and jobs
Section titled “Backups and jobs”Hosted backup
Section titled “Hosted backup”A backup kept off the host, in the platform’s object storage, encrypted to your account’s recovery key. See Backups and restore.
Local backup
Section titled “Local backup”A backup kept on a drive of the instance’s host, restorable only there. See Backups and restore.
Final recovery backup
Section titled “Final recovery backup”The backup the platform makes before it deletes an instance at a zero balance,
marked final_recovery. See
If your balance runs low.
The asynchronous work a command that changes state starts, which --wait and
ghost job watch follow. See Jobs.
Idempotency key
Section titled “Idempotency key”The key that makes a retried request repeat exactly one change instead of making a second one. See Retries and idempotency.