Myth: "Shared hosting handles a few hundred visitors fine"

Myth: "Shared hosting handles a few hundred visitors fine"
Before a product launch, a team load-tested their shared plan: 200 concurrent users with k6. At 140 concurrent, Apache hit MaxClients, requests queued, and the host's process limit (25 entry processes) returned 508 "resource limit reached" errors. The marketing page advertised "handles traffic spikes." The actual ceiling was 25 simultaneous PHP processes — roughly 60–80 real users at any instant. They found this in a test instead of during the launch, which is the only reason it's a case study and not a post-mortem.
Follow the money: process caps are how one box pretends to serve 200 sites at once.
Reality: "handles spikes" means nothing until you know the process limit behind it.