I've never liked the word 'server' which we (EH) expose in our public API docs, so please don't feel any pressure from me to use this term. I'd prefer something more general too. (I wrote the infrastructure layer of our system, and consistently throughout the code they're called 'guests' instead, by analogy with 'hosts' which actually run the virtual machines. Our customer-facing api offers this as an alternative, but we felt it was a bit too technical a word to use in the web interface.) I'm happy with any reasonable choices here, except that to avoid an ugly API, whatever set of words we pick should be single shortish words (not multiple words, and preferably not abbreviations) of a grammatically equivalent type: compute, storage, networking work, as do {computers,guests,instances,servers,machines}, {stores,drives}, networks but mixing between the groups is less good---I can create 'a drive' or 'a computer' but not 'a compute'. Whatever happens, we don't want to leave an illiterate legacy like HTTP's ghastly 'Referer:' header! Cheers, Chris.