[dspillett]

In my experience shared hosting was looked down upon (and still is) not because we were high-and-mighty better-than-thou you-know-nothing toffee-nosed snobs about the entire idea[1], but because of the many (the majority?) of hosts who were absolutely terrible at security (and stability, and performance both generally & through silly levels of over-selling, and everything else, but security is most important).

In this case the hosting is by a company with the technical skills and infrastructure to properly secure and support the service, not some inexperienced kid living with his parents who thinks a simple cPanel installation (that never gets updated for some reason he doesn't notice or can't be bothered to diagnose) is a great almost-zero-effort way to sell hosting to make a bit of extra pocket money over the school/college/other holidays.

Also the lack of control made using certain things impossible, you were usually held back on an old version of mySQL & PHP, and little else to if you wanted to use postgres or python or anything other you were stuck. That is the same here of course: this probably gives you even less control because it is not trying to be shared hosting it is a hosting-platform-as-a-service.

[1] I may actually be a high-and-mighty better-than-thou you-know-nothing toffee-nosed snob, but that is beside the point here!

[jimmies]

Years ago someone I used to know ;-) used to upload php scripts to traverse the ".." dir to shared hosts. You can do that with 9 out of 10 smaller shared hosts. It was hillarious. There is a whole lot less of attack surface when it comes to static content generators.