Web hosting services start from the very basic and very low cost web hosting (including free web hosting services) to advanced and super-advanced web hosting services. Such web hosting services are generally used by businesses that expect significant traffic to their website and that use a lot of graphics, audio etc. Online businesses (e.g. online shops and other such web applications) generally go for advanced or super-advanced web hosting services. Let’s take a look at what these advanced hosting services are: 

High end (shared server) web hosting services: These are just the bigger version of the low cost hosting services (which use shared servers too). The main difference with high end (shared server) web hosting services is in terms of the server space, bandwidth, databases and the number of sub-domains/email addresses. Advanced hosting services will offer more server space, bandwidth and will allow a higher number of sub-domains. It will also support more database types and programming languages. Generally, the customer support will also be better with high end web hosting services (but this is mainly dependent on how good the web host actually is). This kind of web hosting service is used by businesses that have sufficient traffic to their website so as to need a larger bandwidth but not enough to need a dedicated server.  

Dedicated server web hosting services: Besides the shared server web hosting services, you also have the option of going for a dedicated server. This means that you have the server just for your website (s). There is no sharing of server space or bandwidth. This kind of web hosting service is the super-advanced type of web hosting and is generally used by medium-big businesses that have big websites (lot of graphics, video, audio etc) and huge traffic. Dedicates server web hosting is also a good option for people that run multiple websites. They can host all their websites on the dedicated server and get a better performance (and, possibly, save on the cost too). The dedicated server hosting might be managed either by the web host (managed web hosting) or by you yourself. The former is costlier than the latter but relieves you of the overhead associated with managing the dedicated server.  

Sometimes companies outsource their IT infrastructure completely, in which case the dedicated server is managed generally by the same company that takes care of overall IT infrastructure.