Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Unrealistic Allocation Consumed

[Yujin]

Some provider allocates unrealistic amount of Storage and Bandwidth hoping and praying that this customer will not utilize everything. What if one day, Mr.Customer consumed 98% percent of your allocated Storage which is equivalent to 25% of your actual capacity, what would you do?

a) Tell the customer that s/he violating the fair usage policy - even all the uploaded files are valid and part of the website?

b) Ask to get a VPS/Dedicated?

c) Create other issue to get rid of this customer?

[target]

Originally Posted by Yujin

Some provider allocates unrealistic amount of Storage and Bandwidth hoping and praying that this customer will not utilize everything. What if one day, Mr.Customer consumed 98% percent of your allocated Storage which is equivalent to 25% of your actual capacity, what would you do?

a) Tell the customer that s/he violating the fair usage policy - even all the uploaded files are valid and part of the website?

b) Ask to get a VPS/Dedicated?

c) Create other issue to get rid of this customer?

Most of those providers will use a combination of a and b. If the client doesn't swallow they will go over to c

If all clients would use their space and traffic on for instance a $2.00 Per Month 40GB Space 150GB Bandwidth offer you know it can't last First servers will get slow and down and than they will have to loose, suspend, get rid of some customers.

[techjr]

I helped setup some monitoring software for a company not too long ago and there were about 700 clients on the box (Mind you this provider offers the smallest plan at over 50gb space and well over triple that in bandwidth and then had another plan for unlimited everything) We had a discussion about the same thing and they said as long as memory and cpu usage were under control they would let it happen since they still have plenty of space on most boxes.




I doubt this theoretical dilemma would ever really happen, I mean most hosts that offer unrealistic amounts of Storage and Bandwidth do not allow file hosting etc and I can't think of any sites that would not be over using cpu and memory resources usage from consuming the plans space amount, unless it was a pure html site that displayed VERY high resolution photos.
They were consuming less then 400gb of space. On a pretty much full server with that little space used I doubt the host would be worrying too much as long as the provider is within the plans cpu and memory limitations.

[HostMantis]

Originally Posted by Yujin

Some provider allocates unrealistic amount of Storage and Bandwidth hoping and praying that this customer will not utilize everything. What if one day, Mr.Customer consumed 98% percent of your allocated Storage which is equivalent to 25% of your actual capacity, what would you do?

a) Tell the customer that s/he violating the fair usage policy - even all the uploaded files are valid and part of the website?

b) Ask to get a VPS/Dedicated?

c) Create other issue to get rid of this customer?

Or...

d) Change my business model to a more realistic and sustainable one that includes hosting plans that have limits

[Yujin]

Originally Posted by target

Most of those providers will use a combination of a and b. If the client doesn't swallow they will go over to c

Very true but I'm not sure if there's a law about false marketing and if this is considered as false advertising.

[MikeDVB]

If the provider is small and doesn't have the capacity then they would have no choice but to find some way to handle it. They could either be honest about it and admit they made a mistake and that it's not sustainable or they could be dishonest and just find reasons to get rid of the customers who are using "too much".

Most decently sized providers (10+ servers I'd guess) tend to have extra capacity and can shift accounts around as needed to make sure everybody fits. You could easily have a server with 1,000 accounts that uses a total of 200 GB or a server with 100 accounts that uses 800 GB.

Being able to shift some of the larger accounts to servers with extra capacity is one big aspect that makes the difference between a small provider and a medium-sized provider.

There are obviously some other better and worse ways to handle this, but I've summarized/generalized most of it.

[MannDude]

From what i've seen from a previous job working for a rather large 'Unlimited' provider is this:

After 20-25GB of storage the account is automatically removed from the backup system.

Basically any account over 50+GB was verbally encouraged to remove files that are not being accessed to reduce the overall size of their account or upgrade to a VPS.

Granted, very few had accounts that large and they did have the capacity to 'make it work' for the most part. Most of the larger accounts would hit other limits set by CloudLinux that'd degrade the performance of their site before it grew to a size that could consume too many physical resources anyhow. Usually they'd need to upgrade for a reason other than storage/bandwidth usage as their account grew.


It just seems a tad unethical, I think. I know it's rather common practice to oversell but as someone providing a service I would simply feel that I was cheating some of my customers if I was offering something that *realistically* could not be supported in terms of server resources. Nowadays new customers who have never had a website before somehow think they need 20+GB of storage for their new WordPress blog because thats what they see being offered for dollars a month. Furthermore, no one needs 'unlimited storage', and if they did it'd be an enterprise only solution that no average consumer could afford. Business and marketing can be quite misleading in just about any industry, not just in the hosting industry.

[ModelWebHost]

Most of the companies that are of a small volume will use option c and get rid of customer with stupid reasons.

[target]

Originally Posted by MikeDVB

If the provider is small and doesn't have the capacity then they would have no choice but to find some way to handle it. They could either be honest about it and admit they made a mistake and that it's not sustainable or they could be dishonest and just find reasons to get rid of the customers who are using "too much".

Most decently sized providers (10+ servers I'd guess) tend to have extra capacity and can shift accounts around as needed to make sure everybody fits. You could easily have a server with 1,000 accounts that uses a total of 200 GB or a server with 100 accounts that uses 800 GB.

Being able to shift some of the larger accounts to servers with extra capacity is one big aspect that makes the difference between a small provider and a medium-sized provider.

There are obviously some other better and worse ways to handle this, but I've summarized/generalized most of it.

I worked for a decently sized provider with 50+ servers offering unlimited banwidth for 5 years and i know one thing ... if you use to much traffic you will get shutdown even if they had to lie or create an issue to get rid of you.

[SeriesN]

Imho. A generic website don't consume 50 gb space nor a 500gb of bandwidth. Those with such a higher specs should not be on a shared server at the first place.. And most of the site that takes up this much of resource are mainly being used for illegal files (sharing, torrent,leech and so on).I highly doubt there is too many site on shared host that can consume that much resource.And yes i am telliing this from my experience. I own a really active site (Forum with 2000-3000 unique hit a day), and that site hardly use 8gb space and 10gb of bandwidth.

[target]

Originally Posted by SeriesN

Imho. A generic website don't consume 50 gb space nor a 500gb of bandwidth. Those with such a higher specs should not be on a shared server at the first place.. And most of the site that takes up this much of resource are mainly being used for illegal files (sharing, torrent,leech and so on).I highly doubt there is too many site on shared host that can consume that much resource.And yes i am telliing this from my experience. I own a really active site (Forum with 2000-3000 unique hit a day), and that site hardly use 8gb space and 10gb of bandwidth.

True. Problems is most customers have no idea of what their site needs and overestimate.

[MikeDVB]

Originally Posted by target

I worked for a decently sized provider with 50+ servers offering unlimited banwidth for 5 years and i know one thing ... if you use to much traffic you will get shutdown even if they had to lie or create an issue to get rid of you.

Bandwidth is slightly different than disk space, especially depending on how the provider is billed for it. If they're given actual transfer limits and they can pool it then they may have plenty of "extra" but if they're billed by the MBPS then chances are the "over-users" (in their eyes) are costing them money no matter what server they're on.

At the end of the day, you can't expect the world for a few dollars no matter what.

Meh.