Difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting?

Difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting?

With shared hosting, you share resources (CPU, memory, storage) with other hosting accounts. With dedicated hosting, you get your own dedicated machine for your account.

At the end of the day the real difference has to do with reliability and availability vs price.

Shared hosting is cheaper and given the right people to share the server with works just fine. But if you get one resource hog who crashes the server a few times a day it can really destroy your website uptime. This is where dedicated hosting comes in because you don't need to worry about availability (unless you're getting intense amounts of traffic but thats for a different day)

The difference is already in the names of types of hosting. With shared you are sharing server resources with the other users, and dedicated is only used by your needs

Yeah, the difference is pretty simple.
When you buy a shared hosting, web hosting provider hosts your site in one server together with lots of other websites. In this way, a lot of customers share the resources of one server.
Dedicated server means that you rent a whole server and nobody, besides you, can use it's resources.

It's like living in an apartment VS a house, or sharing a dorm room with a room mate VS having your own dorm room, or sharing a bedroom with a sibling VS having your own bedroom.

@joebert nice analogy:)
Also want to add that nowadays some shared hosting companies provide really good performance in their business plans

I'm on a shared host that acts like a VPS. They provided each user with their own system memory and the ability to install and run any program they like. If I want to run a custom configured version of php/apache I have all the power to do so. I can also run off either setup, I can have a few websites running of their setup and a few running off mine.

You are right here.
Some companies (serverpoint) have provided shared hosting that acts like a VPS.
I prefer to use such services because they cost less and supported well.