Do you oversell (don't answer if you don't want too :D)?
What percentage do you oversell by?
What percentage of alloted hosting (storage) is used on average by each customer?
What percentage of alloted hosting (bandwidth) is used on average by each customer?
How can you 'gurantee' that your hosting won't die because of you overselling?

Nope, don't oversell. So I guess I can't really answer the rest of your questions ;)

No here too.
I always tell people that a commercial would have better services ( which sometimes is not the case ) than a free host.
Neither do I give any uptime guarnatee :P

no overselling up in this piece~

We don't oversell either. We target an audience looking for stability and reliability which oversellers can't offer.

Yeah overselling is a bad idea. I make sure I have sufficient resources for the customers I have.

Yes. We do not oversell either.

We just purchased a 3000gb transfer for one of my other companies servers, and got accused of overselling however :(

No, I currently have no plans to oversell either. However, I think AH-Tina makes a good pro-overselling point in her post on starting a new business (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=302872). :)

Originally posted by abstracthost
no overselling up in this piece~

Up in this piece? haha... :stickout:

I totally agree with Tina, you may oversell to an extend where your server is about 60% utilized unless you provide guarantee max of accounts hosted on a server / real high end hosting that requires low ratio of accounts.

Greetings:

Our parent company -- Dynamic Net, Inc. -- does not oversell.

Thank you.

Overselling is not a bad thing. It doesn't mean you'll go out of business just because you do it. Doing it out of control is where problems come. A lot of new hosts think you can just oversell because you buy a dedicated server for $99/mo. with 1000 gb transfer. If you sell 15 accounts with 100 gb transfer, that means you're overselling. Which is not the case. Overselling would be using a bunch of system resources (CPU, RAM, HD space) etc.. Putting 100 accounts that have 75 simultaneous user forums each, obviously this will be a problem. But if you can set it up right and move customers around without them noticing (literally nobody notices), then the problem is almost eliminated. Overselling can be a good way to get your prices down and profits up. Or it can do just the opposite and flush your company down the toilet. If Ev1Servers didn't oversell and kept the prices they have now, they'd of gone out of business long ago :)

Originally posted by RaineTech
Overselling is not a bad thing. It doesn't mean you'll go out of business just because you do it. Doing it out of control is where problems come. A lot of new hosts think you can just oversell because you buy a dedicated server for $99/mo. with 1000 gb transfer. If you sell 15 accounts with 100 gb transfer, that means you're overselling. Which is not the case. Overselling would be using a bunch of system resources (CPU, RAM, HD space) etc.. Putting 100 accounts that have 75 simultaneous user forums each, obviously this will be a problem. But if you can set it up right and move customers around without them noticing (literally nobody notices), then the problem is almost eliminated. Overselling can be a good way to get your prices down and profits up. Or it can do just the opposite and flush your company down the toilet. If Ev1Servers didn't oversell and kept the prices they have now, they'd of gone out of business long ago :)

The difference is Ev1servers can provide what they offer. Sure you may be gaining more income per server, but at a cost of slower more unreliable servers. It all depends who your target market is.

>Do you oversell (don't answer if you don't want too )?

Yes

>What percentage do you oversell by?

250%

>What percentage of alloted hosting (storage) is used on
>average by each customer?

15 to 20%

>What percentage of alloted hosting (bandwidth) is used on
>average by each customer?

8.5%

>How can you 'gurantee' that your hosting won't die because of
>you overselling?

Daily monitoring and moving customers on time if space gets short. None of my servers uses more than 50% of its resources at present. Also even if all users used all the resources alloted to them I'd still make profit. Additionally for the clients with a lot of files but few accesses and CPU usage I by servers with 250 GB hard drives. This way I can save a lot of space on the other servers because usually 5% of the users use 95% of the diskspace

Originally posted by thomas.smith
>What percentage do you oversell by?

250%


Ouch? That's not information I'd want to be public knowledge.

Originally posted by Amdac
Ouch? That's not information I'd want to be public knowledge.

I'm doing regular surveys and almost all clients are very happy with the performance and support they get. Also no server uses more than 50% of its resources. Personally if I was looking for a hosting account I'd definitely buy my offers (I mean even if it wasn't my company) because the product is excellent.

I think the other thing with overselling is, what I may think is not overselling, others may think is overselling. It's a matter of opinion in some way which is fine. To oversell effectively, you need to get bulky. The reason ev1 can oversell so well is they're so huge that it makes things easier for them.

I only oversell bandwidth if my datacenter just charges me more when I reach the badnwidth limit but NEVER when there is a change that they'll get my servers offline if I reach the bandwidth limit. Well, with diskspace you can't do that, so: no. lol

So, if I were to oversell by 30% on average sized accounts the chances of getting in trouble are almost nil?

Oversell is not a good practice, just wondering what happen if the resources ran out :)

overselling = generally a bad idea
tina does have a good point in that post - and for server resources overselling is not as bad as if you are overselling your network. When you start to oversell your network, people start to have spikes, then they start to lose performance, then your routers start to have problems and it all goes downhill.

Overselling isn't bad. Everyone look at your statistics for bandwidth use. Most companies will find that their customers as a whole only use around 30% max of their allocated plan bandwidth. This allows you to sell easily double the bandwidth that your server may be capable of.

Even if one of your servers (From the point of view of 95 percentile servers) gets close to your limit, you can quickly move some large bandwidth using accounts to a server with more resources free.

Overselling makes sense to me. Otherwise your underselling your servers. You have 100% resources on a server. Why only use 30% of them when you can use more. Sure on paper it might look like your trying to sell resources you don't have but in practice it works, of course not all customers are going to use 100% of their bandwidth each month.

The only thing I consider more closely when structuring my company like this is the performance of the servers. It's one thing to oversell your bandwidth so you utilise your resources, but its another thing to pack your servers with too many accounts, just because your server isn't using up all the bandwidth that it is allocated.

It just takes a bit of management I think. In theory you can't sell what you don't have. But in practice you are always able to get what you don't have. So sell it now, and manage your servers around what your customers are using. Not what you give them.

Regards.

Although I'm overselling by 250% my customers use only around 20% to 25% of the bandwidth I have available per server and less than 50% of the diskspace. If a server was used to 75% I would move the customers so there really is no risk that I'm runnin out of resources.

Originally posted by thomas.smith
Although I'm overselling by 250% my customers use only around 20% to 25% of the bandwidth I have available per server and less than 50% of the diskspace. If a server was used to 75% I would move the customers so there really is no risk that I'm runnin out of resources.

That type of thing is where overselling is bad. People try to oversell based on their bandwidth and disk space. You need to sell based on hardware, not disk space/bandwidth.

Of course I monitor the servers daily to make sure that the server load doesn't get too high either. I didn't mention it because I thought it would be self explaining.

I oversell only on diskspace, as I have never come accross any client that will use more than 15% of there disk space.
Usally our servers have very low server loads and low memory usage and about 60% at most of the servers bandwidth goes out.
When i say i over sell i mean, server bandwidth 1000gb, total bandwidth sold on that server: 1200gb we never really go over that as then problems will likly happen.
Maybe one day when we get even bigger we wont have to oversell at all :)

yeah,diskspace is properly better to oversell

IMHO if you don't oversell you are selling yourself short.

Now I am not talking about selling 30Gigs of bandwidth for 3.95 when your provider charges you 30 bucks for it. What I am referring to is this:

If you colocate or lease a server from a data center and that server includes 1TB bandwidth are you going to put 100 10GB accounts on it and stop, or are you going to keep putting customers on this server for as long as

a)It does not affect the server performance load wise and

b) Overage charges don't reduce your best case scenario profit?

Originally posted by matrosov
IMHO if you don't oversell you are selling yourself short.

Now I am not talking about selling 30Gigs of bandwidth for 3.95 when your provider charges you 30 bucks for it. What I am referring to is this:

If you colocate or lease a server from a data center and that server includes 1TB bandwidth are you going to put 100 10GB accounts on it and stop, or are you going to keep putting customers on this server for as long as

a)It does not affect the server performance load wise and

b) Overage charges don't reduce your best case scenario profit?

That is exactly what I do...

Do not ovesell any of your service.

You need to keep your customer happy so they can refer to you later.

Best luck.

I really think it matters what market you are trying to fill. For instance, our customers use what they purchase, so in our case overselling would be stupid and would put us out of business quickly.

Then again, we don't exactly skimp on anything related to our operations, so overall we have an extremely high rentention rate. For the hosts that just go out and buy a server from ServerMatrix, a template from Monster Templates, and a CPanel liscence and then open shop with no previous experience things may be different.

However, when you start hosting people that actually require the best (not just demand it) things change quite quickly.

Peter

It also depends on what packages you sell. If you sell 50 MB/1 GB traffic as your smallest account it is more likely to be used up than 200 MB / 5 GB as your smallest account because the small account guys (like family sites with 5 hits a month) don't need 5 GB of traffic.

You might want to reference a poll I did on the subject a while back for some more opinions

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=295433

I really think it matters what market you are trying to fill. For instance, our customers use what they purchase, so in our case overselling would be stupid and would put us out of business quickly

Not necessarily it all depends on how you developed your prices.

For example if you have a plan that offers 8.95 for 10Gigs bandwidth and a 1TB server with .75 for each GIG overage you stand to make $895 in gross revenue per server if you don't oversell. Now, if the server can handle 150 accounts you'd make $967 even if all of your customers use up 100% bandwidth on their accounts.

We don't oversell disk space, but we do oversell bandwidth by about 50%. Out of 2000GB of bandwidth each server has alloted, the busiest server only uses about 320GB per month.

Bandwidth can be purchased if you need more. Disk space cannot without involving some kind of downtime.

Overselling to a certain point is ok, however, look at HostRocket. They push 200-300 clients per server on Pentium 3 systems.

I feel that what the customers pay for should be available to them, as you cannot predict what they are going to use. Now, most people won't use all the resources they are alloted.

However, a under-loaded server is always better than a over-loaded server.

I personally don't oversell, as having 30-50 happy clients is better than 100 angry clients.

Originally posted by Pheaton
We don't oversell disk space, but we do oversell bandwidth by about 50%. Out of 2000GB of bandwidth each server has alloted, the busiest server only uses about 320GB per month.

Bandwidth can be purchased if you need more. Disk space cannot without involving some kind of downtime.

Usually there are just a few guys that use a lot of diskspace... Like 5% of the people using 80% of the used space... This allows to just move these users to another server without any downtime.

I'm not talking about moving clients to another server. I'm talking about purchasing extra space on your server. I mean, which customers like being relocated to a different server because they keep using up all their alloted space?

>I mean, which customers like being relocated to a different
>server because they keep using up all their alloted space?

What is the problem about beeing moved to another server ?