Virtual Machine

A Virtual Machine is a lot like a real computer but it isn't a real computer. Instead, a real computer hosts this virtual machine which has an operating system, acts like a real computer etc but rather than having its own RAM, CPU, hard drive etc, those things are operated by the real computer on which several of these virtual machines share the resources of. Kind of confusing. But the gist is that practically speaking you buy a giant super computer to host your virtual machine and then you can lock down a virtual machine so it just does a specific task. But, like a real computer it can still be accessed over the internet like at computer.iarc.uaf.edu. This web page is hosted by a VM for example. But if you don't need physical access, such as you communicate to this thing remotely over the internet etc then it's a good way to go because someone else can manage it day to day for security updates and such.