“Traditional” hosting is what companies like GoDaddy and 1&1 offer and includes Shared, VPS or Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated.
With Shared Hosting you pay for a portion of the server that’s hosting your website. It’s like riding a bus. You pay for a portion of the bus (gas, service, maintenance) along with tens or even hundreds of other people riding the bus at the same time. When companies don’t balance their assets those bus rides can become pretty cramped. So when one of your bus-neighbors starts streaming lots of video or gets Dugg you’ll have to suffer the consequences like slower performance or reliability issues.
Virtual Private Servers are essentially dedicated servers inside another dedicated server. In this configuration companies take a dedicated server with say 8GB of RAM and use tools from VMWare or Oracle to create virtual machines. Each virtual machine takes some of the 8GB of RAM and can be used just like a dedicated server. Virtual Private Servers still suffer from some of the same problems as Shared hosting. While each VPS gets a dedicated amount of RAM and disk space, your neighbors might be maxing out their VPS which may cause problems for you.
Dedicated servers are used by people or businesses that have lots of traffic to their site, need more security or control over their assets and don’t want to be affected by other people on their server. Dedicated servers must be managed by someone with expertise in the hardware and software used to run the server. Management includes ensuring that software patches are applied, security is maintained, performance is tuned, etc. Dedicated servers take a fair amount of time to setup and maintain.
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