Shared hosting is where you get a folder on a server all to yourself. There are other folders on that server that contain other website's contents. When people visit the web server using your web address, the server knows to display your website. The space allocated to your folder may or may not be limited. You usally get an FTP login that enables you to connect, upload and edit files. Traffic to the server and CPU usage are shared amongst all accounts existing on the server.

This is the most common type of hosting. For most websites that are starting out this is more than adequate. Once your website goes over 25-50 gigabytes of traffic per month, you will want to consider a higher level of hosting.

This is in between a dedicated server (below) and shared hosting (above). As the graphic on the left indicates, you get a "virtual" dedicated server, but there are a number of these "virtual" dedicated servers runnning in one big real server. Confusing huh?

The main benefit of a virtual private server is that it's private. It's a completely isolated file system and operating system. If you need to change the configuration of the server to meet a need, there's no worries about it affecting other users. VPSs are partitioned based on disk space, CPU usage, RAM usage and bandwidth. You get as much as you buy.

The simplest way of putting this is it's virtual private servers... turned inside out. So your website goes into an amorphous pool of 10s or 100s of computers. They live there securely floating around with with potentially 100s of other's websites data. A master system allows for the space and processing resources of all the servers in the pool to be utilized while still keeping your files isolated as you need to access them.

We don't recommend cloud computing for serving up a normal website (due to speed and latency) but for high bandwidth applications (such as a content delivery network, distributing a video file to 5000 viewers at once) the burstable resources of Grid computing can come in really handy.