A number of logistic patterns have emerged out of necessity in the website hosting industry, shaped by the constantly evolving provisions of technology, the growth of the industry, and plain nuts-and-bolts market supply and demand.

Why We Share Computers

To start with, when the first website was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the advent of HTML and the World Wide Web, computers were smaller and weaker than they are now. It would have been out of the question to have more than one website share a machine. The World Wide Web took off in popularity from there, and the age of the "server farm" came into the fore, with companies warehousing racks of server computers to host websites.

That's an ecological problem. Vast quantities of computers packed into such a small space generate an unmanageable heat bubble and consume insatiable amounts of power. Fortunately, computers evolved to be more powerful and pack more hard drive capacity into a smaller space, and the idea of a shared host was born.

In your average shared host scenario, many web domains are hosted on one physical server. Since most websites are very small and only attract a few thousand visitors per month or less, this is an efficient arrangement. It saves the environmental cost and is less resource-intensive overall. It also lets providers pass the savings on to customers, enabling the famous cheap website domains we've been enjoying for a couple of decades now.

VPSs - Still Shared, But A Better Neighborhood

Virtual Private Servers are a step up from that standard.

Very few websites have enough traffic to demand their own whole dedicated server to themselves. The top-hundred most visited domains contain some of these, and the very top web companies like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo run their own dedicated server farms in-house. For the rest of us, shared servers are plenty of virtual turf.

But there are exceptions. Maybe one blog made the front page of Slashdot this morning, or it's a particularly busy time of year for a web business. Traffic spikes to one website affect every other website on that shared server, creating a bandwidth drought for whoever else has the bad luck to be located at that MAC address.

Enter the VPS. It's still a shared server, but one that's more tightly managed than a fully shared server. A virtual private server is partitioned in such a way that minimum resources are guaranteed for each web domain hosted there, and traffic has a more flexible range of bandwidth so that it doesn't trouble the other sites. Imagine a dedicated server as a private single-dwelling home, a shared server as a block of apartment flats, and a virtual private server as a gated community - still a close-knit neighborhood, but with active mediation.

Other Considerations

So the question becomes: why use VPS hosting? There are other reasons besides just traffic bandwidth and raw disk space. Different web businesses have different security requirements. If a website handles customer data, such as credit card numbers, they will want better security protocols for protection, whereas websites without this need would benefit more from the speedy page load times without security encumbrance.

VPS hosting also allows a website to grow over time. For media-intensive sites, such as ones that serve up video files, storage and bandwidth demands will increase as the site matures. Another case is when a site allows user-generated content, such as a social network platform. As the network grows, more users join and upload more profile pictures and status updates, expanding the demands of a site that once needed only a trickle of bandwidth.

Shop around the different package deals at your web host, and see what plan best suits your needs.