VPS and privacy-hosting glossary

VPS (Virtual Private Server) — a slice of a physical server that behaves like its own machine, with a dedicated operating system, root access and resource allocations. You get the isolation of a private server at a fraction of the cost of bare metal.

KVM — the virtualization technology underneath. A KVM VPS is fully virtualized: it runs its own kernel, can load custom modules, and is genuinely isolated from neighbors — unlike container-based OpenVZ, where the host kernel is shared and oversubscription is common. Every WolfVPS tier is KVM.

vCPU — a virtual CPU core mapped to physical processor time. A tier listed as 2 vCPU gives you two cores' worth of compute. NVMe — solid-state storage that talks to the CPU over the PCIe bus, several times faster than SATA SSD and far ahead of spinning disk. Every tier here, from the $3.50 Pup to the 16-core Fenrir, is all-NVMe; we do not drop to slower disk to hit a low headline price. Unlimited traffic means no metered bandwidth cap and no overage billing, and deploy time is how long provisioning takes — roughly 60 seconds once payment confirms here.

No-KYC — the host does not run a "Know Your Customer" identity check: no ID, no passport scan, no document upload. At WolfVPS we touch no personal detail at all: no ID and no email — the account is a secret token. Read what that protects you from on the no-KYC VPS page.

Private vs anonymous — these are not the same, and the difference matters. We describe ourselves as private, not anonymous: we collect no ID, but true anonymity also depends on your own payment and network hygiene. If you fund a wallet from a KYC exchange or connect from your home IP, no host can undo that for you.

Monero (XMR) — a cryptocurrency that hides sender, receiver and amount at the protocol level using ring signatures and stealth addresses, unlike Bitcoin's fully public ledger. We treat it as a first-class payment option. On-chain settlement means a payment is verified directly on the blockchain rather than through a third-party processor that would hold your identity; we run an any-coin checkout that settles on chain and never expose payment-rail internals. A non-custodial wallet is one whose private keys you alone hold, so no company can freeze or surrender your funds.

Offshore hosting — running your server in a jurisdiction other than where you live or operate, so a different country's law governs the hardware and its content. It is not a synonym for no-KYC or for anonymity; it is purely about where the server sits. See what offshore hosting means for the full picture.

DMCA-ignored — an operational policy, not legal immunity. A host outside US jurisdiction has no obligation to action a US copyright notice, so we handle routine notices as policy rather than automatic takedowns. We never claim content is "untouchable" or "bulletproof." Whether this is lawful is a fair question, and we answer it plainly in is DMCA-ignored hosting legal.

Court-order-only takedown — we act on valid court orders in the server's own jurisdiction, not on every complaint that arrives. The hard abuse floor is the absolute limit beneath that policy: no CSAM, no weapons trafficking, no terrorism content, ever — no exceptions and no appeals. Everything else lives within the laws of the jurisdiction you choose.

Clean IP — an IP address with no prior spam or abuse history and no entries on DNS blacklists, so your mail and signups are not pre-flagged. Most budget clouds recycle ranges that arrive already tainted; we screen and allocate clean IP space, and you can verify our ranges yourself before you buy. Use the check if an IP is blacklisted guide to test any address.

Blacklist / DNSBL — a DNS-based blocklist (Spamhaus, for example) that mail receivers query to decide whether to reject a message. Landing on one quietly destroys deliverability. Reverse DNS (PTR) — the record that maps your IP back to a hostname; correct PTR is essential for sending mail and is set through the control panel.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC — the three email-authentication records that prove your mail is legitimate. SPF authorizes which servers may send for your domain, DKIM cryptographically signs each message, and DMARC tells receivers what to do when the first two fail. Without all three, even a clean IP struggles to reach the inbox.

x402 — an open protocol that revives the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code so software can pay for a resource over HTTP. We support it so an AI agent can buy and deploy a VPS autonomously, with no human checkout loop. The agents page has a copy-paste quickstart.

Gasless payment — a transaction where the network fee is sponsored or abstracted away, so the payer does not need to hold a separate token just to cover gas. USDC-on-Base is the US-dollar stablecoin USDC running on Base, the low-fee Ethereum layer-2 we use for x402 settlement, which keeps per-use agent payments cheap and fast.

agents.json and llms.txt are machine-readable files at the root of a site: agents.json describes how an autonomous agent can transact with the service, and llms.txt gives language models a clean, structured map of the site's content. Together with an OpenAPI spec they let agents and answer engines discover and use the API directly, without scraping a marketing page.