What is a virtual host service?

A virtual machine is a system that is emulated on top of a physical machine. Virtual machines still function as if they are real, but their access to resources such as memory storage are virtualized, meaning that they don’t have direct access to the hardware. Virtual machines believe and act as if they are regular physical machines but, in reality, it the underlying physical machine that interfaces between the virtual machine and the hardware. This is important because, for example, it allows you to run a virtual system on hardware that would otherwise be incompatible so long as the underlying machine is simulating or translating across these incompatibilities.

A virtual hosting service, such as DigitalOcean or AWS EC2, is a service that allows users to rent virtual machines. Renting a virtual machine from these services can make sense if you need scalable computational power or cloud-based access without needing to (buy and) store the hardware and manage the backend infrastructure. With these services, the cloud provider is responsible for maintaining the physical servers, networking, and the operational security of the data center so that you only need to configure the operating system and software running on the virtual machine. For example, if you wanted to host a website with a backend server that processes sensitive information (such as payment information), the virtual machine would provide a controlled and isolated execution environment that you could configure to your needs, while benefiting from the reliability, redundancy, and security offered by the cloud provider. Using such a service won’t save you from application vulnerabilities (e.g., SQL injection) but they should handle just about everything else, and the less you have to do, the fewer opportunities there are to mess up.

Citations

1. “Virtual Hosting.” Wikipedia, 25 May 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki Virtual_hosting. Accessed 25 Jan. 2026.
2. “Virtual Machines: Learning the Basics.” UFS Explorer, www.ufsexplorer.com/articles/storage-technologies/virtual-machines-data-organization/. Accessed 25 Jan. 2026.