Originally Posted by PluginForage

1- Shared servers - crowded and all resources are shared. Lowest on the totem pole. Smaller traffic sites do well on these. Forget about self hosting any videos or other resource intensive stuff.
2- VPS = shared server with resources dedicated to your particular partition. Many are not any better than shared hosting. The more premium packages offer advantages.
3- Dedicated managed - the server and resources are yours, somebody else takes care or the server, e.g. hardware and monitoring. Can handle self hosted videos pretty well.
4- Dedicated you take care of it all. Need to be a geek.