Something of a compromise between a free blog hosting service and a dedicated server, shared hosting options mean that the customer rents a partition on a server that is itself (as the name implies) shared with other customers. Since the customer does not have access to the server as a whole, he or she has less say in hardware and operating system choice, and the web hosting provider always takes care of server management.
Another type of shared hosting that has most of the qualities of a dedicated server is the virtual private server, or VPS. Similarly to shared servers, the customer doesn’t get to rent an entire physical server, but rather a partition on a shared server. But that partition virtually has the qualities of a full server, including its own operating system and software of choice, and it can be rebooted as if the entire server was rebooted (without physically rebooting the server and affecting other users’ partitions in the process).
Similarly to dedicated servers, renting a partition on a shared server is recommended for mainly for those who want to publish other websites besides blogs, since most free blog hosting services (such as Wordpress–see the “Free Hosting” tab above) offer a whole range of quality services, including hosting any number of blogs, integrated statistics, protection against spam, tracking comments, etc.