What makes VPS different from a shared server?

[Lynnstoever]

There’s a lot of difference in both, other than their price tags.  Shared server is the cheapest of all the three, but as the name suggests, you are sharing the web space with umpteen websites.  Shared servers share all the major resources like RAM, Disk space and CPU. They have a lot of other disadvantages too. If the load on one of the sites hosted on a shared server increases, it affects the other websites hosted on the same server. When the amount of traffic is very high, this drawback will affect your website very badly.

Here’s another defect of shared servers! When you host your website on a shared server, you have absolutely no control over server configuration; and hence software installation is not at all possible. While considering all these, it’s better to invest a little more money and buy a VPS or a semi dedicated server. VPSs contain advanced virtualization technologies. A VPS is a powerful and cost-effective solution to host a website. A physical server is in fact partitioned and used as several virtual machines, providing the users perfect standalone machines to host their sites.  The cost of putting up a VPS is very much lesser than dedicated servers. If you don’t have a really high budget, a VPS is the best option to host a website.