[PuffinBlue]

Ah, you're right, disk IO is one I hadn't considered too. I"m so used to availability of cheap VPS and SSD I'm not sure the last time I used actual shared hosting myself.

Those sorts of shared hosting plans have a funny way of disabling your site if you get a big surge of traffic, despite the 'unlimited' claims.

I was told once, "Yes, your plan is unlimited, but not infinite.' when I had a post on a long forgotten site go mildly popular.

I suppose on those types of machines the sheer number of connections would get you in hot water too, especially if they're running vanilla apache and it starts burning through memory there.