: Shared hosting — everybody's code is using same physical machine, same operating system and probably even same web server. Usually there are no guarantees at all about how much CPU will

shared hosting — everybody's code is using same physical machine, same operating system and probably even same web server. Usually there are no guarantees at all about how much CPU will be allocated for your application. On the other hand, you get log more power when others are idle. There is however usually a cap on how much CPU your app may use. This is good option for sites with low traffic.
VPS (Virtual Private Server) — it's a virtual machine, usually sharing same physical machine with others, but VPS are allocated on server in such way, that they either have fixed share of CPU or at least guaranteed minimum. You have full control over your own, full-fledged operating system. Big downside of VPS-es, is that very often they use network attached storage (typically iSCSI), which isn't great for I/O. Big advantage is that they come in all kinds of sizes, so it's a viable solution for all ranges of traffic (though for high traffic you might need more than one VPS). Best know VPS service is Amazon EC2.
dedicated server — that just a piece of hardware that you have collocated in data center. No virtualization overhead, not sharing hardware with anyone, you can have local disks. Disadvantage complexity of maintenance and practical impossibility of real time scaling (if your site get's slashdotted, there is no way of adding more servers fast enough). As for price, YMMV, if you have very high traffic site, it might be overall cheaper than VPS. But you have to calculate for additional complexity, having deal with technical stuff like backups, failovers, load balancing etc.

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