Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Overselling?

[Spunkyasp]

I don't understand oversellers. When they offer you 10TB of bandwidth, and you use up 3TB why do you get suspended? You aren't violating their terms by exceeding the inode limit, so why does this happen? I have never used shared hosting, but after reading some posts in this forum I have saw that this happens very often.

[PogiWeb]

It can be many things from having to many processes running or exceeded the maximum amount bandwidth for that day.

[ldcdc]

Data transfer is no longer a limiting factor for some hosts, in the sense that the average usage per customer remains low, and they have the connectivity already in place to handle the exceptions. What they won't have though is a customer monopolizing a $1000+ server (markup included). If they would, instead of having a few hundred dollars profit per month (or not so few), they would end up having a net loss of several hundred dollars.
Inodes won't have anything to do with data transfer, but will in most cases end up as a pretty effective limit to disk space usage, because they are a limit on the number of files you can host. Inodes limits are usually on the conservative side, but they may or may not be strictly enforced.

[Rageki-John]

Well, most likely if a user is consuming a high amount of bandwidth, they are most likely consuming a high amount of CPU power and memory as well. However, I am not sure what excuse a host would have for a client who is consuming a lot of disk space but not bandwidth.

[Orien]

Well, most likely if a user is consuming a high amount of bandwidth, they are most likely consuming a high amount of CPU power and memory as well. However, I am not sure what excuse a host would have for a client who is consuming a lot of disk space but not bandwidth.
That's sometimes true, but not always the case. Static file downloads can generate a lot of bandwidth easily without too much CPU usage.

[Rageki-John]

That's sometimes true, but not always the case. Static file downloads can generate a lot of bandwidth easily without too much CPU usage.
That's true. I suppose the host could always say that the client is hogging up the network port and is making the speeds slow for other users?

[SiberForum]

I don't understand oversellers. When they offer you 10TB of bandwidth, and you use up 3TB why do you get suspended? You aren't violating their terms by exceeding the inode limit, so why does this happen? I have never used shared hosting, but after reading some posts in this forum I have saw that this happens very often.
I suppose there is no need to understand them. They do everything "in hopes" and all overseller techniques are for promotion and marketing

My last hosting company kicked me off due to file hosting, this wasn't Warez or anything illegal, and it was scripts that my company made compiled in huge 7ZIP files.
I also had 900 copies of phpBB3 installed; it strictly turned me off them because these were genetic scripts.
Their server was a lag shack due to everyone on it going crazy with overselling and using some serious CPU load along with the upstream bandwidth.

[JLHC]

That's true. I suppose the host could always say that the client is hogging up the network port and is making the speeds slow for other users?
They can just easily say that file sharing are not allowed and this has violate their terms of service.

[Daniel L]

overselling is %90 of the time using more then the server can provide (to the best of my knownledge)

People that oversell are just plain wrong although overselling isn't wrong in all cases because some people can actually handle the overselling which is great but others cant.

[ldcdc]

People that oversell are just plain wrong although overselling isn't wrong in all cases Sounds to me like you haven't yet made up your mind on the matter.

[-Edward-]

I also had 900 copies of phpBB3 installed
On a shared host?

[DDT]

Ah the monthly (at least) overselling post
Why do hosts oversell--Customers have no idea what they need (99%of the time) recently a user posted wondering about size of a forum etc. & getting cut off from their old host etc. and this was my response:
I have one customer with 3 sites (as an example) (1 )is e-commerce-a mid-size "store" fairly busy but not major by any means, (2) is his personal business site for his own business (mainly hometown type traffic but he has a large site, lots of photos & such then (3) is his forum, an SMF with numerous "add-ons" also "bridged" to a Coppermine photo gallery (so forum users are automatically Coppermine users and can post photos. His forum has 28,439 posts and 1,363 members with an average of 10-30 on-line at one time but peaking at up to 100 (max was 163) had 8 when I just looked and his Coppermine has over 150 photos (so photos & thumbnails & "comments", just quickly adding the galleries in my head).
His entire account (all 3 sites+forum+Coppermine is currently using 536MB of disk space, just over 1/2GB and his bandwidth so far this month is at 2.6GB.
But people LOVE those big numbers so hosts advertise them and with great success. But there is ALWAYS a catch, in the CPU use or somewhere there is a reason you can't really use all that advertised stuff (and as my example shows 99% of web customers don't need those huge numbers anyway)... but people think "bigger is better" and "more for less" instead of looking at what they really need and will use then they end up here crying because so & so suspended them or whatever when they tried to upload that 500GB file or whatever...
It is what it is, false advertising, but since 99% of the people never realize they aren't using anywhere near what they were promised (and they didn't need it anyway) it continues to be the most used advertising "gimmick" in the hosting world and the oversellers always say "It's nothing wrong, nobody gets hurt and everybody's happy except that 1% so what's the problem"
Yet at least once a month there is some post here like this questioning the ethics of the practice...and my opinion is if it was "nothing wrong" nobody would ever question it... just my 3 cents
Merry Christmas to All, I have to work on my New Years DNS resolutions...

Usually people use "unlimited" and unusually large bandwidth limits with no real catch other than limitations elsewhere (i.e. CPU, RAM) to naturally keep the actual bandwidth usage to a minimum.
This is marketing.