To have a website on the internet, you need to have your website files on a web server. InMotion Hosting offers Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting. In essence, all three of these services are similar in the fact that they all give you a web server to run your website on.

Shared vs. Dedicated Hosting

With our dedicated servers, you rent an entire server. This is optimal for people that have very high traffic to their websites or they need to setup their server in a very specific way. Not everyone needs to have a fully dedicated web server however. If you have a website that you do not expect thousands and thousands of hits a day, you can save quite a bit of money if you rent a small portion of the server. Shared hosting is when you share a portion of the server with other users rather than rent an entire server to yourself.

VPS Hosting - the Gap between Shared and Dedicated Hosting

VPS Hosting falls between both Shared Hosting and Dedicated Hosting, as it can be considered technically both shared hosting and dedicated hosting. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, and is a virtualized server. A VPS server mimics a Dedicated Server within a shared hosting environment.

You may be familiar with similar technologies, such as VMware or Virtual Box. They allow you to run several virtualized operating systems on one machine. For example, your desktop may be running Windows 7, but you can also run other operating systems such as Windows XP or Linux without needing to restart your computer. Our VPS servers function in the same manner. While we have one physical server, we can run several different virtualized operating systems on that one server. Each virtualized operating system acts as if it was a dedicated server. This allows you to have all of the benefits of a dedicated server at a fraction of the cost.

VPS servers function very similar to fully dedicated servers:

• They have the privacy of a separate physical computer
• They run their own operating system (Linux)
• They run their own instances of many applications, include Apache, PHP, and MySQL. These applications can be configured as needed.
• They can be restarted without affecting other VPS servers on the same physical machine
• They have dedicated amounts of RAM allocated to them