Web host overselling tactics explained. How hosting providers offer so much for so little |
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The practice of overselling ones’ services is nothing new. Airlines oversell their available seats because they know that statistically at least a few passengers will not attend the flight they have tickets for. The passenger may miss his/her flight or they have canceled their plans last minute. The web hosting industry is no exception to the practice of overselling its services. A web hosting provider can gain extra income from each server they own by overselling the servers’ amount of usable resources such as hard disk space, bandwidth, CPU time, and RAM usage. If done correctly, overselling can be a valuable tool to the success of a web hosting company. If done incorrectly, overselling can lead to the downfall of even the best web hosting companies.
I think that in order to survive in todays market, a web host needs to oversell at least some of its resources. If the host is not overselling, they are simply wasting money. I’ve been in the web hosting business for years and I can say that 90% of all my users don’t even come close to using the amount of disk space and bandwidth I allot them. For this reason, I would say that overselling your resources by 200% can be comfortably and safely done. If a server has a hard disk with 500GB of available space, you would oversell it to 1000GB. If you have 2000GB of available data transfer, you could oversell it to 4000GB. You can do either two things with this – fit more clients on one machine than usual, or offer twice the amount of disk space and bandwidth with your plans while still keeping the same user amount.
Detrimental overselling – how it can effect a normal shared customer
I’m sure by now you have seen hosts offering an absurd amount of disk space and bandwidth with their plans and charging hardly anything for it – you know the companies…100GB of disk space and 2000GB of transfer for only $5.00/m. These hosts are overselling their services at a rate of 10X-20X what can be safely done. In order to make a profit off this, they will stuff hundreds-thousands of clients on a single server which is not equipped to handle such resource usage. This will lead to downtimes, slow page loads, scripts that fail because of low resource availability, etc.
You should avoid these hosts. I can guarantee you that your website will be suspended before it can ever reach 100GB disk/2000GB transfer. They will suspend you and cite a line in their terms of service that will say something to the effect of – if a user is monopolizing a servers’ resources, xyz hosting company has the right to immediately suspend the account for resource abuse. No refund will be offered.
In conclusion, if a web hosting provider is overselling safely, it can help the user in the end – lower prices and more resources. But if the hosting company is overselling improperly, it can be detrimental to the end user – continuous server failures, long periods of downtime, slow site load times, etc. Like they always say, “you get what you pay for”.
Jun 15th, 2008 at 2:11 am
Hi
I must congratulate you on making an example of airline ticket with webhosting. It certainly the truth. Web hosting is very cruical and have to be very careful while choosing. Reading blogs, forums, reviews helps quite well.
Nice article though!
Thanks
Chris
Jul 5th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Usually the hosting companies have limitations by CPU and RAM usage that they don’t make customers aware of. One can’t come even close to bandwith usage that’s advertised because he will hit the CPU limit. I’ve had websites shut down because of these hidden limitations. So, it’s best to ask the company for prior purchasing an account, or alternatively search for user opinions in the forums.
Jul 17th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Why do so many web hosts oversell their services…
This is a great article on why web hosting companies oversell. Now I know how its possible they can offer so much bandwidth and disk space for practically nothing…
Sep 16th, 2008 at 9:12 am
It’s about time that some of these companies are shown for what they really are. Too many of them over book their space and bandwidth with several accounts. But then again, there’s nothing that can be done about it.
Sep 18th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
The hosting companies I have been with all provide nearly unlimited everything, except CPU usage. That’s where they got me. HostGator is cheap, and I hear good comments about them. But those making the comments may have low traffic sites. I have an account at Bluehost, and they were getting many complaints because of such a low CPU usage threshold. A few months back Bluehost doubled the allowed CPU usage, and its been better. But as you noted in your post, these hosts still can hurt you. In Bluehost’s case, they doubled CPU usage but mysql availability has gone way down. Nothing like a dynamic site not loading.
I completely agree with you. You get what you pay for.
Dec 13th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Just to make sure to some ‘newbies’, that could also include the bigger hosts, such as HostGator.
Dec 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Hmm, I hadn’t considered that thought before, and although I was aware that person- or usage-based companies oversold or overbooked their services, I didn’t know that web hosting companies also practiced that. Good to know.
Dec 25th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
I often figured that Hosts were overselling their services like other services you mentioned in the industry but I had no idea it was as high as doubling the resources! But I guess if past history has shown consumers dont even come close to using their full capacity of space…why not? it’s a no-brainer.
Jan 22nd, 2009 at 9:50 pm
If I ever need to host my own site, I will keep your advice in mind and stay away from hosts that oversell their services by 10-20 times more than what can safely be done. I know it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, but the practice seems a bit shady and unethical to me. When there’re problems, the consumers are the ones who end up getting screwed.
Mar 17th, 2009 at 5:22 am
I just had another account up with hostgator . com and they seem to be the most favored hosting destination right now. So far so good.
Websitesource.com seems to have oversold what they can provide. Their email servers are very unreliable. My worst nightmares have come from them.
Guys and Gals this rule of “u get what u pay for” fully applies here. Don’t compromise on web hosting.
Mar 17th, 2009 at 10:54 am
This is the main problem on web hosting marketing. Some provider are very greed that they do not take any responsibility to their customers after selling out their products. I perfer to select those one that have good customer support web hosting although i have to pay more. But it is worthwhile.
May 6th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Overselling is not the only reason why there are so many bad quality web hosts these days. Outdated php versions, non secured linux kernels, long response times, non helpful personnel are just a few reasons why web hosting industry quality declines over the years. If you ever find a quality web hosting provider, don’t search again for another
. The crisis reflects not only to small firms but also to gigantic companies that are established decades ago.
Aug 23rd, 2009 at 2:56 am
Nice point given about overselling in hosting point of view. Come to think of it, it is true that many hosting companies start to send out the message like “You are using more resources” type of message and sometimes can see the error message of “Bandwidth Limit exceeded”. Now, I know clearly of how these hosting companies overselling their products. Will avoid this type of companies. Thanks for sharing this great info!