Difference Between Grid Hosting and Shared Hosting

The main difference between shared web hosting and grid hosting is scalability.

Shared hosts have fixed capacities. It is somewhat ironic that popular sites on the shared host are punished and may face temporary unavailability of web content. There is no such thing as fixed capacity on grid hosting. An unknown site on a grid host may consume fewer resources. Over time, the same site may gain popularity but the site is allowed to increase its utilization of the grid’s computing resources

Grid hosting usually means that the web space you rent is not located on one (potentially shared) machine, but is more like a "virtual machine" (think VMware) which is hosted on a cluster of servers (a grid) and Shared hosting, sometimes called shared services or virtual hosting, is simply when multiple web sites share the same server, thus reducing the cost for everyone.

Grid hosting is when you have a site that bounces around several serviers, shared is when you're sharing server space on one server with hundreds of other users typically.