Managed Shared Web Hosting is a term that refers to Shared Hosting (Shared Web Hosting) service, which is technically administered by the web hosting provider.

Most web hosting providers that offer personal or small business Shared Hosting (Virtual Hosting) services do self-service web hosting. Although there is no term as “Self-service” in the web hosting industry the pharase can be used to explain a web hosting service, which is managed by the account owner.

A Managed Shared Web Hosting service requires the web hosting provider to support the customer’s account client-side, to fix install apps and service, to monitor the resource usage, to do backups, to resolve issues inside the Shared hosting account and to troubleshoot it when necessary.

Cloud has become a broad term used to describe various products and services, which is supposed to be utilizing the distributed computing model. Strictly speaking “Cloud Server” is just a virtualized computer instance, a Virtual Private Server. However the term “Cloud” should mean that a “Cloud Server” is a computing instance created on top of an IT infrastructure in which the processing power (processing nodes) – CPU and RAM for example – reside on different physical machines than the data storage (SAN or storage nodes).

Some companies define “Cloud Server” for example as “on-demand virtual machine, created to deliver customizable performance and reliability”, although this is pretty much marketeer’s language. Please also be advised that billing a any virtual server hosting service (whatever it is labeled) on per minutes, per hour or per day basis doesn’t make it “Cloud”. What makes it a “Cloud Server” is the ability to scale up the allocated computing resources on demand.

To understand term “Cloud Hosting”, please read article “What does a Cloud Hosting Mean?“