Just wondering if overselling is successful in the long run. I've seen a lot of companies come and go, so don't bother responding if you havent' been in business for at least a year or two. And if you have and your overselling, let me know how its going. I'm trying to get some experienced advice here, not just anybody's opinion. Thanks guys.

You have to oversell a bit. You'll run into problems if you oversell too much though - so BE CAREFUL.

Greetings:

"You have to oversell a bit."

No, you do not.

Our parent company has been in business since June 1995, hosting since November 1996.

It has yet to oversell period.

Thank you.

You're right you don't have to oversell if you dont mind inefficiency. Just an example:

Take shared hosting machine X with 200 customers on it. Say if you say 'ok customers, you can use 350mb of storage each'. and they're like 'cool i like storage space, thanks guy'. Now say each customer uses 50mb of storage space on average (some 350mb others 1mb)... you are using 10 gigs of disk space on that server, a 40gb drive is more than adequate and yes you are overselling.

If you actually spend the money on the 2nd drive, and put in enough storage capacity for the 70gb that youre selling even though theres no way its going to all be used just for the sake of 'not overselling' then you shouldn't not be running a business you should be working for one... let somebody else make the decisions because youre wasting both yours and your customers money by doing so.

It is in the customers best interest to go with a host that oversells responsibly as they are run more efficiently and can spend the $10/mo they get from their customers on more important things like quality tech support, better equipment etc.

I wont even get into the fact that not overselling bandwidth is straight up stupid.

-Brendan

Greetings:

"If you actually spend the money on the 2nd drive, and put in enough storage capacity for the 70gb that youre selling even though theres no way its going to all be used just for the sake of 'not overselling' then you shouldn't not be running a business you should be working for one... let somebody else make the decisions because youre wasting both yours and your customers money by doing so."

Part of the ethics as well as the customer service side of the equation is being able to deliver what the customer is paying for in the first pace.

If you offer 200 MB of space and they are using 30 MB for 12 months, and on month 13 of their stay increase to 200 MB in a few minutes, that's their right and they should be able to do so.

If they down your server because you don't have the hard drive space because you skimped on a drive (size or quanity or both), then they have a right to complain, get their money back, leave, etc.

Our parent company has in-house support and system administrators, et all and doesn't skimp on what is necessary to make the customer happy.

And that includes being able to immediately (no delay) deliver the full capacity of their plan.

Thank you.

If you are a reseller, overselling is probably the best way to make a profit. As long as you keep up on your usage, you can always move up to a bigger plan to keep up with demand (depending on your hosts rules).

If you have your own servers, overselling bandwidth is again good as long as your actual usage doesn't start getting close to your limit, especially if it is a hard limit so you don't get packet loss, etc.

Overselling meaning putting too many customers in a box is never a good idea.

In the long run, calculating your sold plans using actual usage with comfortable margins allows your company to keep lower prices IMHO. You can certainly only sell 60G if you have 60G, but that will necessitate either less profit per box, or a higher price per Gig. It depends on your business model. If you deliver premium services and cover your costs, then you most certainly can afford to not oversell. If you stay with mainstream prices, it becomes more difficult to stay in business because you can't put as many plans in a box without overselling space smartly, and your income will be less per box.

Making sure your customers get what they paid for is, of course, the most important consideration.

Overselling with correct planning and monitoring is successful in the long run, depending on what you are overselling and by how much.

It has nothing to do with ethics at all, if you monitor your servers proactively then there is no reason you wouldn't be able to provide every customer with exactly what they are paying for if they needed to use it.

-Brendan

There's no real risk to overselling as long as you keep an eye on things. If you stack a server to the brim in the first place then you'll always be in trouble - there's always room left when you 'close' a server to new accounts. If over time a few accounts expand beyond your estimates then you just move them to a server that has more available resources - whether that's diskspace, or transfer.

I don't always agree with Brendan but he's on the money with this one - it's inefficent to not make the most of your available resources without damaging quality of service.

Greg Moore

Greetings:

"It has nothing to do with ethics at all, if you monitor your servers proactively then there is no reason you wouldn't be able to provide every customer with exactly what they are paying for if they needed to use it."

A customer with a high speed connection to the Internet can upload large MB of files in moments.

So if you are overselling disk space instead of being smart and just buying the right number and/or quantity of drives, then you are risking the chance that a customer will down the server when they try to IMMEDIATELY get what they are paying to have in the first place.

Thank you.

A customer with a high speed connection to the Internet can upload large MB of files in moments.

So if you are overselling disk space instead of being smart and just buying the right number and/or quantity of drives, then you are risking the chance that a customer will down the server when they try to IMMEDIATELY get what they are paying to have in the first place.


Some will, but most don't. That's the principle. You make allowances to have a large margin, to cover the people who actually use all their bandwidth.

I should have stated the implied shred of common sense that would have to go along with the proactive monitoring to make my little hypothetical situation successful. Yes you would have to leave more than a few megs of space free, maybe even a gig or two but certainly no more than that. Lets pretend that were monitoring for almost full partitions... like say 90-95% instead of 100% which would be kinda silly.

-Brendan

Originally posted by dynamicnet
So if you are overselling disk space instead of being smart and just buying the right number and/or quantity of drives, then you are risking the chance that a customer will down the server when they try to IMMEDIATELY get what they are paying to have in the first place.

Maybe you need an example. One of our servers has been recently closed to new accounts. It's closed as it's 'oversold'. The server load is hovering at around 0.25, the /usr partition is around 60% full, and the /home partition is around 50% on a 40 gig hard drive. Our largest plan offers 1 gig of hard disk space.

Following your example with the evil 'quick uploader', the state of play after his/her frenzied moving in would leave that server with the /home partition with a little less than 50% of free space.

The server is fine, and it has plenty of room for customer growth. There are several hundred accounts on it. If they are all added up and totalled with the space and transfer offered for each account, then yes, it's an oversold server. The reality is far from that however. For it to become a problem we'd be looking at over 100 extra accounts or more.

I think you're looking at 'overselling' from the point of view where people 'overload', but if you're perfectly happy to flush away money when it's not required, then by all means go right ahead.

Greg Moore

Originally posted by CDXSolutions
Just wondering if overselling is successful in the long run. I've seen a lot of companies come and go, so don't bother responding if you havent' been in business for at least a year or two. And if you have and your overselling, let me know how its going. I'm trying to get some experienced advice here, not just anybody's opinion. Thanks guys.

Just wait and watch.... you will see so many will vanish from WHT thos who are overselling...
:D

I dunno I've managed to stay in business quite successfully for a while now, its definatly not impossible.

-Brendan

You all have that customer who emails in 8 tickets a day (or more), maybe once, but I'm talking about the one who does it every frickin' day. You will agree that in order to provide speedy support, one has to employ enough techs to handle the requests that come in. However, this does not mean you should employ 400 techs just in case all of your customers decide to email in 8 tickets a day. This would simply be extremely poor business sense.

Now, there are extremes to everything. You don't oversell the server/line 50,000% capacity as some hosts have done. You have to be reasonable and you should have data as to what is reasonable and what is not, and figure it out to be sure there aren't problems. Just offering as low price for zillions of space, transfers, and features isn't the way to oversell.