# Glossary > Terms used throughout the WebVH Hosting documentation, Affinidi Portal, and the pnm CLI. WebVH Hosting stores, validates, and publicly serves the did:webvh identifiers your Verifiable Trust Agent (VTA) creates and signs. You manage it with the Personal Network Manager (PNM), the pnm CLI. ## Core concepts | Term | Meaning | | WebVH Hosting | The service that hosts did:webvh identifiers: it validates each signed log, stores it, and serves it at the DID’s public URL. [Overview →](/products/affinidi-elements/webvh-hosting/overview.md) | | Appliance | An Affinidi-hosted WebVH Hosting instance that you create in Affinidi Portal and Affinidi runs for you. | | Hosting server | Any WebVH Hosting deployment: an Affinidi-hosted appliance, or a self-hosted unified daemon or set of standalone services. | | VTA | Verifiable Trust Agent: holds the keys for your DIDs and signs every version of their logs. [VTA →](/products/affinidi-elements/vta.md) | | PNM | Personal Network Manager: the pnm CLI you use to register the appliance and create and manage DIDs through your VTA. | | VTA slug | PNM’s short local name for a VTA, passed with --vta . | | Super admin | A VTA admin with no context restriction. Creating a top-level context requires it. | | Context | An isolated namespace in your VTA. A DID’s keys live in the context it was created in. [Manage the contexts on a VTA →](/products/affinidi-elements/vta/vta-management/manage-contexts.md) | ## DIDs | Term | Meaning | | DID | Decentralised Identifier: a [W3C standard](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/) identifier that resolves to a document of its own keys and endpoints. | | did:webvh | A DID method whose full history lives in a signed log served from a web address, so anyone can verify every change back to the DID’s creation. [Specification →](https://didwebvh.info/latest/specification/) | | DID log (did.jsonl) | The signed, append-only file that records every version of a did:webvh DID, one JSON entry per line. | | SCID | Self-certifying identifier: the part of a did:webvh DID derived from its first log entry, which ties the DID to its history. | | Path | The part of a hosted DID after the domain, such as my-service. You choose it with --path, or the appliance generates a two-word path. | | Hosted DID | A DID whose log is stored and served by WebVH Hosting. When your VTA creates it, the VTA’s DID is recorded as its owner. | | Pre-rotation | Committing hashes of the next update keys in a log entry, so the following entry must be signed with one of them. Set with --pre-rotation. | | Serverless DID | A did:webvh DID your VTA manages without a hosting server. Register it with a server to host it. | ## Appliance | Term | Meaning | | Server DID | The appliance’s permanent DID, a did:webvh, shown on the configuration’s details page in Affinidi Portal. You register it with your VTA using pnm did-mgmt servers add. | | Setup DID | A temporary did:key the appliance uses during activation, different from the Server DID. The PNM command in Affinidi Portal gives it a setup admin entry on a webvh context in your VTA, which expires after 6 hours unless the appliance claims it. | | WebVH URL | The appliance’s public address, shown on the configuration card in Affinidi Portal. Its host is the domain in every DID you create on the appliance. | | Hosting domain | The host a DID resolves from. An appliance serves all its DIDs on its own domain. [Hosting domains →](/products/affinidi-elements/webvh-hosting/concepts/hosting-domains.md) | | Server ID | PNM’s short local name for a registered appliance, such as my-webvh, passed with --server. | | Deployment state | The provisioning status shown in Affinidi Portal: Pending, In Progress, then Complete, or Failed. | | Setup State | The appliance’s activation status in Affinidi Portal: Inactive until activation completes, then Active. | | Control plane | The service that receives signed logs from your VTA, validates and stores them, and syncs them to edge servers. | | Edge server | The service that serves each DID’s log and agent-name redirects at the DID’s public URL. | ## Resolution and names | Term | Meaning | | Resolve | Fetch a DID’s log from its public URL and verify it. For a hosted DID, the URL is https:////did.jsonl. | | Agent name | A short name such as alice, bound to a hosted DID so that /@alice redirects to it. [Give a DID a human-readable name →](/products/affinidi-elements/webvh-hosting/webvh-management/agent-names.md) | | alsoKnownAs | The DID document field that lists a DID’s agent names. A name resolves only while the document lists it. | | Parked name | An agent name taken out of service but still reserved to its DID. | | Mediator | A DIDComm v2.1 relay service with its own DID. Add it as a service endpoint in a DID with --mediator-service to make the DID reachable over DIDComm. | ## Next steps - [Create your first hosted DID](/products/affinidi-elements/webvh-hosting/get-started/create-your-first-did.md): register your appliance with your VTA and publish a DID. - [Overview](/products/affinidi-elements/webvh-hosting/overview.md): what WebVH Hosting does and how it works.