Fast, Good & Cheap

PaaS is a hosting layer that takes your source code and turns it into a running application for you, owning the machines, the runtime, the build, the routing, the certificates and the restarts, so that shipping becomes a push rather than a project.

Serverless computing runs your code only while an event is calling it: the provider conjures an execution environment on demand, throws it away afterwards, and charges for work performed instead of for capacity sitting idle.

A container is an application packaged together with the libraries and configuration it needs, run as an isolated process on a host that is already switched on, so the same package behaves the same way on a laptop, in a build pipeline and in production.

A VPS is a software-defined slice of one physical machine that behaves as a server in its own right, with its own operating system, reserved CPU, memory and disk, and administrative access down to the kernel.

A dedicated server is an entire physical computer rented by a single customer, with no hypervisor taking a share and no other tenants on the hardware, chosen when consistent performance, specific components or provable isolation matter more than the ability to resize in seconds.

Managed hosting is any plan where the provider runs the server on your behalf, covering updates, hardening, monitoring, backups and tuning, so the thing being sold is administration time with a machine attached rather than the machine itself.

Git is a distributed version control system that records the history of a set of files as a graph of snapshots, lets many people work on branches of that history at once, and merges their work back together.

HTTP is the request-and-response protocol of the web: a client sends a method, a path and headers, a server answers with a status code, headers and a body, and each exchange stands alone unless the two sides agree to carry state in a header.

A REST API exposes an application's data as resources at stable addresses and lets clients read and change them with HTTP's standard methods and status codes, so that the protocol itself carries most of the meaning.