Comment by peterwwillis

Shared hosting providers stay in business with the principle that somehow they provide a relatively secure platform for their users, so a few of them do harden their systems enough to prevent most priv escalation. But one buffer overflow and a lack of mandatory access control later and you've got gold. Priv escalation exploits have been so common in Linux in the past decade that I would consider local access the same as root access [without MAC like grsec or selinux enabled].