VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It’s commonly thought of form for web hosting. The most common types of web hosting are:
- Shared Hosting which many clients share the one machine (either physical or virtual machine)
- Dedicated, which you own a physical computer within a data centre
- Virtual Private Server (VPS) which many virtual machines work of the one dedicated machine.
A Virtual Machine is essentially the exactly the same as having a physical (dedicated) serve, the only difference is that there can be many Virtual Machines on the one Physical Machine.
You can find more information about Virtual Machines can be found here.