Hi there, sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong forum or if this question has already been asked (nothing came up in the search engine), but...

I currently have a basic webhosting plan here at Lunarpages and I was just curious for the sake of comparison what kind of server computers are used for shared hosting plans, and how many other accounts typically exist on the same server. I'm not sure if this info is publicly available, so my apologies if that's an invasive question. I'm asking mostly because I have a client who has high-demand sales on her site and is having server problems when 2000-3000 people rush to her site all at the same time for the sale (with about 300,000 page hits). It overloads the SQL connections and slows the site down dramatically. I know that some of this is avoidable on my end as the programmer, but I don't know what else I can do at this point, so I've started to consider going with either a dedicated or VPN plan. So I just want to know how the shared situation compares to the dedicated or VPN situation on a hardware level. Any help or direction someone could give me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!