Shared hosting packages provide a prebuilt hosting environment to quickly get your website and emails online. These are best for simple and small websites that don’t require many resources and don’t require any special software packages to operate. Shared hosting is also in a shared environment which means other websites utilising resources can impact your own website. This is largely mitigated through containerisation within shared hosting but it’s still a factor that should be considered. The barrier to entry is low for shared hosting as a point and click control panel is provided as standard with many features and settings already preconfigured, but the downside is there’s usually very little you can customise.
A VPS on the other hand gives you more resources, root access and free rein to use those resources as you see fit with a much lower risk of having to worry about other noisy neighbours impacting your website or project’s performance.
You can customise your VPS to the nth degree and have the environment setup exactly as you require. You’re responsible for all of the configurations within the VPS so you need to be familiar with administering a VPS to this level.