Dedicated servers (please explain them to an idiot)

These are a lot more expensive than 'business' hosting plans and I'm really confused about what you actually get that's extra? Like obviously there is the "someone else's traffic surge doesn't kill your speed" aspect, I understand that - is there less downtime? I guess it is faster - is this to a substantial degree? What are the other advantages?

I am kind of horrified by how little I understand this.

total control of machine
not sharing resources = more resources, in general, particularly RAM
not sharing resources = not vulnerable to other users of the machine fucking up stability or overusing resources (mitigated to some extent by well designed shared server resource allocation)

i'm assuming there that "business hosting" is a euphemism for expensive shared hosting

i'm assuming there that "business hosting" is a euphemism for expensive shared hosting

yeah, i think so. What does "more RAM" mean in practice (assuming I'm not gonna be hosting a Quake server)?

what would ILX be like if it were on a shared server? how much slower? different in other ways?

"more RAM" = more space to process information in fast access space without having to write info to the hard drive, meaning in general better, faster processing

I don't know if we'd notice the difference with ILX given what it is; there's little constant access for the users and the site itself has a lot of shortcuts in it that intentionally limit the amount of info any one request processes.

are we talking webservers here or some other server use? in that context RAM is particularly important for moderate-heavy DB use or if you are trying to serving hundreds of pages per second.

are we talking webservers here or some other server use?

I guess I am mainly interested in server-ing (dynamic) webpages, database stuff & Flash content? Really I am just trying to work out the difference in general :(

assuming you're not dealing with thousands of concurrent visitors, flash content, like static HTML, is mostly limited by user bandwidth, not the server

dynamic/database stuff depends on the details

I still totally don't get this fwiw - so far the consensus seems to be 'these don't do very much'?