[ glossary ]

LEVELS OF WEB HOSTING SERVICE - VIRTUAL DEDICATED WEB HOSTING

This is a fairly new offering, which seems to be bridging "shared" and "dedicated" hosting. You will read about dedicated hosting in the next paragraph, but here's how "virtual dedicated" hosting differs from "shared" (or "virtual") plans.

Several web sites are still physically placed on a single computer server, but the number of such sites is lower and each one is given a dedicated "copy" of the operating system (e.g. Linux), along with a guaranteed portion of computer resources (disk, memory, etc), a separate copy of web server software (e.g. Apache), in addition to direct "root-level" access to the server itself.

In fact, to the web site administrator it's all but indistinguishable from the "dedicated" solution (see below), even though the physical computer is still shared. This arrangement allows for a much higher level of customization: since you have full access to the server, you can install additional software (such as database servers) on your virtual "machine", reconfigure the web hosting software, etc etc.
Main Characteristics Of 'Virtual Dedicated' Hosting

Cost: medium (typically between $50 and $250 per month)
Equipment investment: none
Bandwidth: medium
Degree of control: high