Every shared host oversells to some degree, and that is not a scandal. If every account used its full allowance simultaneously, no shared server on earth would cope. The model depends on most accounts idling most of the time.
The question is not whether a host oversells. It is by how much.
Where It Tips Over
At sensible density, your site gets the resources it needs whenever it asks. At high density, requests queue. Your page does not fail, it just takes two seconds longer, and it takes those two seconds most reliably at the busiest time of day.
The symptoms are frustrating precisely because they are intermittent. The site is fine when you check it. It is slow when your customer checks it. Nothing is technically broken, so nothing gets fixed.
Occasionally it goes further and one account on the machine. A badly configured site being crawled aggressively, or one that has been compromised. Degrades everything alongside it.
Why The Economics Push This Way
Once a server is paid for, every extra account on it is close to pure margin. If hosting is sold on price alone, and buyers compare on price alone, the pressure runs one way. Density is invisible on the sales page.
This is how a pound a month becomes possible. Not through efficiency, but through arithmetic.
What You Can Actually Observe
You cannot see the account count. You can see the effect. Check your site's response time at nine in the morning and again at eight in the evening, from an external monitor rather than your own browser. Consistency matters more than the raw number.
If it is quick when the world is asleep and sluggish when it is awake, that tells you something the marketing page will not.
Our Position
We run fewer accounts per server than we could, and it is a large part of why we are not the cheapest option you will find. That is a deliberate trade, and it is the one that lets us publish uptime figures and quote response times we can actually meet.
