At least with Mediatemple’s shared hosting, they had a “grid” service that would host your site on a cluster of servers and claimed to be able to handle large b

At least with Mediatemple’s shared hosting, they had a “grid” service that would host your site on a cluster of servers and claimed to be able to handle large bursts of traffic. It worked because each page request ran a complete cgi php script to generate the page view and then terminated. There was no long running server.