I've seen the term used to mean dedicated servers or VMs, by European hosting companies. Possibly all German companies though that might not be a solid memory,

I've seen the term used to mean dedicated servers or VMs, by European hosting companies. Possibly all German companies though that might not be a solid memory, but it does seem quite localised. I assume it is to differentiate between hosted servers where you have an account, multiple accounts, or a reseller account, but not full admin (root level) access. Always stuck me as a clunky term, but it was where my head went first on reading the title here (then I thought DNS servers, but that did not compute so the first thought "won").