Only in specific situations, where the site is using Apache and has .htaccess files enabled. I would argue that using Apache in the first place is non-optimal, but enabling arbitrary .htaccess files for clients is also a potential disaster.

Then again, I suppose there are enough people out there who just want to FTP up their wordpress code and call it a day, so... ugh.

WordPress expects a working .htaccess for its URL structure, as do most modern PHP applications. So virtually all shared hosts will support .htaccess.

> I would argue that using Apache in the first place is non-optimal

What would you prefer? nginx is not suited to shared environments at all.

> WordPress expects a working .htaccess for its URL structure

I haven't heard this. I'm running WordPress via NGINX with no issues.

If you're only uploading some stuff to wordpress do you need shared array buffers?

And boy do they, I used to be a shared hosting administrator and sometimes people would do stupid things like create 10MB .htaccess files with the subnets of all of the countries they wanted to block and then would call to complain that their site was loading slow. (Probably not a great idea to parse a config file for every request but at least it exists)