Virtual hosting is a broad term that incorporates a lot of different hosting services and solutions. Virtual hosting generally allows multiple IT appliances, such as websites and applications, to share a single Web server.

Traditionally, virtual hosting was limited only to website hosting, where websites were hosted and executed from a hosting service provider. However, with the advent of cloud computing and other managed services, virtual hosting now includes other solutions, such as virtual server hosting, virtual application hosting, virtual storage hosting and/or entire virtual data center hosting.