What is another term for public clouds, where businesses can offer subscriptions or pay-as-you-go services and sometimes provide lower-tier services free of charge?

The term that best describes public clouds, where businesses offer subscription or pay-as-you-go services and often provide lower-tier services at no charge, is multi-tenant. In a multi-tenant cloud environment, multiple customers share the same infrastructure and resources while keeping their data separate. This model is prevalent in public clouds because it allows providers to maximize resource efficiency by serving multiple customers on a single set of physical resources, which leads to cost savings that can be passed on to users.

Public clouds are designed with scalability and flexibility in mind, attracting a wide range of users, from individuals to large enterprises, who benefit from the on-demand services without the need to manage the underlying physical hardware. This flexibility is a key characteristic of the multi-tenant architecture found within public cloud offerings.