Websites hosted on a Shared Hosting environment have access to a shared pool of server resources available to a single physical or virtual server. Because of the nature of this setup, certain limitations and restrictions apply to the amount of resources each user can allocate for a specified period.
Although the concept of sharing resources makes the Shared Hosting service very cost-efficient for the end user, some high-traffic and resource-demanding websites and applications may require more than the available fair-share resources or a more flexible setup and configuration that is not suitable for a shared environment.
For such projects, the Virtual Private Server provides an excellent alternative by being much more affordable than a fully dedicated server and far more powerful performance-wise than a typical shared hosting service.
Additionally, customers may have superuser-level access to the operating system instance, create unlimited hosting accounts, install almost any software that runs on that OS and freely allocate all the available server resources without affecting or being affected by other customers' websites.