| There are many types of servers; everything from | | | | it can knock all of the other hosted sites offline ..thus |
| email servers, web servers and proxy servers to | | | | it is not as reliable as if you have a single dedicated |
| wow private server and backup servers. Virtual | | | | server hosting your site. One advantage, however, is |
| Servers are a hybrid of a dedicated server; one that | | | | that it is the most cost effective of the server |
| is stand-alone and is usually used for one high traffic | | | | setups due to the shared hardware resources. |
| website, and a shared hosting type where many | | | | On the other hand, the scalability of a dedicated |
| websites are hosted on one platform. In essence it is | | | | server can cause problems if expansion is necessary. |
| a single machine or server that pretends to be many | | | | In this case the site would need to be offline unless it |
| by having the ability to run various operating systems | | | | were ported to a completely different server and |
| and separate server software and configurations for | | | | while more reliable than a shared hosting setup it is |
| each of many different sites but sharing the | | | | also considerably more expensive. |
| hardware resources such as processor, memory and | | | | A virtual private server (VPS) is a mix between a |
| hard drives. | | | | dedicated server and a shared hosting account. The |
| There are many advantages to using virtual servers | | | | physical server is divided into many virtual servers |
| vs. shared hosting or dedicated servers. In a shared | | | | each running completely independent from one |
| hosting setup, if the server software becomes | | | | another. If one of the virtual servers goes down, the |
| corrupt or if one particular host site becomes corrupt | | | | others on the physical server are not affected. |