Web hosting can be divided into three types: dedicated hosting, VPS hosting (virtual private servers) and shared hosting. Below you’ll find a comparison of dedicated, vps and shared hosting.
Dedicated hosting is the big-boys web hosting option. With dedicated server hosting you can customise and individualise the server settings of your site completely according to your own unique and individual requirements.
VPS hosting (short for Virtual Private Server) is the in-between between dedicated and shared hosting. It can be a bit difficult to get your head around how VPS hosting works but this type of hosting provides each site with a portion of a server, causing each part to act in a similar fashion as a real dedicated server. VPS hosting gives you your own IP address and is the recommended option for small to medium sized businesses.
Shared hosting is the budget option and would be the appropriate choice for personal blogs and small websites. Sites on shared hosting share the same IP address. The down side of shared web hosting is that you have no control of what other websites are hosted on the IP, you might end up in a bad neigbourhood. The other downsize is that resources such as CPU and RAM are shared with dozens of other sites on the IP. The upside of shared hosting is its affordability.