Overselling

Overselling is an act of over-allocating resources. It takes place in many industries, including the web hosting industry. Some people believe that it isn't necessarily a bad thing, while others have the opposite opinion.

A basic description of overselling

Overselling is where a web hosting provider has (for example) 100GB space and 1000GB data transfer on their server. They sell 150 accounts, each with 1GB space and 10GB data transfer. To some people, this level of overselling is acceptable. It's unlikely that even 100 of the accounts will use their 1GB. The bandwidth is usually a burstable limit, so even if it is reached, the server won't suddenly go offline. More likely, the web host will have to pay the datacentre some overage. There are sufficient resources to provide the service, and the host will probably have the foresight to upgrade the servers as needed.

The (bigger) problems with overselling

A problem (or to some people, a bigger problem) comes when hosts oversell to the extreme. Let's take the server from the last example but pretend there are 1000 sites on this server. Even if the sites aren't using all the space, chances are that the server will be getting lots of hits from these 1000 sites. Because of this, it will become slower and slower until web hosting customers get fed up and leave. If the host has this many customers on one server, there is probably no light at the end of the tunnel.

Another problem is the "unlimited" hosts. There is no such thing as an unlimited hard drive or unlimited bandwidth. Both are finite resources.

It's possible to give the illusion of unlimited, but there is a barrier that will be hit sooner or later.

Conclusion

Overselling occurs with many web hosts. However, it's impossible to tell on the face of it if overselling is causing a negative effect or not. If the web hosting packages look too good to be true, then they probably are.

Use good judgment when looking at web hosts. Bear in mind that people who rent servers will be paying between $79 and $499 a month for a typical web hosting server. If a host is saying "1GB space and 10GB bandwidth for $1 a year," then they need at least 1000 customers on a $79 a month server to make a profit. And at $79 a month, the server won't be very powerful.

Share / Bookmark this page: