Whats the difference of the 3

[Nawz]

what is the difference between shared, dedicated, and vps hosting?

Nawz Reviewed by Nawz on 12th Jun 2009. Whats the difference of the 3 what is the difference between shared, dedicated, and vps hosting? Rating: 5

[ACiD]

About Shared

With shared you occupy a server with hundreds of other sites and, for your site to perform well, rely on the others not to be overly demanding. They tend to have lots of goodies, most of which you'll never use, slowing down the server. The again, they are the closest to a point-and-click solution, with a comprehensive control panel and webmail, and are cheap as chips.
So they're great for startups. And often great for mid-sized sites too. But...
While there are those who sing the praises of their shared server web host, there are others that have problems, such as slow-to-dead-slow support. If you have an uncomplicated site, requiring few database queries per second, even with quite a lot of traffic, they can be a good option. Until something goes wrong and you open a support ticket, that is. Then, all bets are off.
For example, I'm a reseller for Lunarpages, and recommend them for simple sites with a small database, else little traffic; I host a few of my own there. But not for more demanding websites. Guvnr, for example, with a growing database, the resource-intensive WordPress platform, various Web 2.0 scripts, expanding traffic and the occasional Digg, outgrew shared quite quickly. (Which has led to me writing this series. Lucky you!)

About VPS:

"A virtual private server (VPS, also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server or VDS) is a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers such that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted."

With a VPS, essentially, you can:-

• have root access, to build your own distribution, whether for:-
• 
  
  • a website or blog
  • multiple sites and/or blogs
  • a mail server (integrated or standalone)
  • data storage (video/backup etc)
  • a slew of other web applications
• have managed or unmanaged hosting, as with a dedicated server. Unmanaged is inexpensive and, if you follow this series, for most uses it's all you need.

About Dedicated:

A dedicated server is where you occupy the entire, unpartitioned computer. Like VPS, it can be managed or unmanaged. If you have a whopper site that ratchets up heavy processing, with many hundreds of thousands of database requests per day, you need a dedicated plan. Then again, many sites took the dedicated route when VPS was barely buzzword, and may be high on costs, low on resources, and ripe for rightsize.
Also, poorly supported or low-budget dedicated boxes are less powerful than many VPS options. As is the case between poor VPS providers and quality shared servers, there is a lot of cross-over. Think Venn diagram. Here again, there is potential for many sites to move, improving on performance while saving on costs.
For sure, if you don't have a huge CPU requirement but do need lots of RAM, then a VPS is an option and, especially for unmanaged, heaps cheaper.
For some more technical pointers on the cross-over between dedicated and VPS, Scott Yang has an excellent article at HostingFu which is well worth a read, considering things like burstable CPU and I/O, redundant storage, and even the more eco-friendly VPS option. One point I'm pinching from Scott, because everyone hates downtime...
The VPS will be generally better managed, even when it isn't managed. It's arguable, but if you have two web hosts, one with a bunch of VPS clients on a partitioned computer, the other with a single client on a dedicated box, which has the bigger incentive to maintain the machine? And with VPS, the virtualisation software has to be maintained anyway.

Copied & Paste It from here: http://www.guvnr.com/web/web-dev/vps...-vs-dedicated/

[Mac]

Hawk change teh title and stick this pls