A VPS offers levels of performance, flexibility and control somewhere between those offered by multi-tenant shared hosting and single-tenant dedicated hosting. While it might seem counterintuitive that the multi-tenant VPS arrangement would be called “private”—especially when single-tenant options are available—the term “VPS” is most commonly used by traditional hosting providers to distinguish it from shared hosting, a hosting model where all of the hardware and software resources of a physical machine are shared equally across multiple users.