bandwidth and diskspace overselling

A quick gimmic to get users to host with them. Similar to the "free domain" offers of years past (which were actual VALUE).

Overselling is accepted by many people and is considered "good practice" by many hosting companies. Personally, overselling is taking users resources and giving them to someone else. It's like renting a limo for the night, paying $65/hour, and just because you're inside at an event for 4 hours, that doesn't mean they get to take the limo and do other things. I PAID for that time - sit outside! ;)

I don't believe in overselling (disk or bandwidth). Many hosts DO and it's almost accepted these days, but in my opinion you're giving resources that were allocated for user "X" and selling them to user "Y" just because user "X" hasn't used them yet.
 
handsonhosting said:
A quick gimmic to get users to host with them. Similar to the "free domain" offers of years past (which were actual VALUE).

Overselling is accepted by many people and is considered "good practice" by many hosting companies. Personally, overselling is taking users resources and giving them to someone else. It's like renting a limo for the night, paying $65/hour, and just because you're inside at an event for 4 hours, that doesn't mean they get to take the limo and do other things. I PAID for that time - sit outside! ;)

I don't believe in overselling (disk or bandwidth). Many hosts DO and it's almost accepted these days, but in my opinion you're giving resources that were allocated for user "X" and selling them to user "Y" just because user "X" hasn't used them yet.
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Well said handsonhosting, I agree 99.9%.
Nice writing.
 
The extremes of overselling are more a result of competitivity on numbers, rather than quality.

That being said, I don't see overselling in itself as a bad thing. Most users will likely upgrade once they reach say 90% of their allocated resources, or reduce their usage in some way. In any case, they will avoid reaching 100% usage. That means it is reasonable to assume that is always some amount of resources left unused, that could be "oversold" quite safely, either for a profit, or to pass the savings to all customers, or, and here I appeal to a cause that some people are ridiculously fond of these days, to use fewer servers and thus be more energy efficient. :)
 
A lot of large and new hosts out there believe overselling is fine but it is not. Overselling deceives people and the people that buy an oversoled package are not getting what they pay for. Everyone has to become more realistic and see the problem with overselling.

Come on, you will never get to use 300GB space, 1TB bandwidth for $3.95 per month! The host would go bankrupt, and you would have to move again. Hosts that oversell will never let you use that much resources for that price.
 
Come on, you will never get to use 300GB space, 1TB bandwidth for $3.95 per month!
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That's a level of overselling that may indeed be hard to sustain, but it's not where overselling starts. ;)
 
I believe that overselling is a marketing gimmick. We would naturally like to get more for less, so many people are duped by these offers.

I don't believe in overselling as it might (and probably will) put a strain on server resources, and if someone really uses what they need on the oversold plan, server performance will be greatly affected, making people angry and making you lose business.
 
Bikster.com said:
I believe that overselling is a marketing gimmick. We would naturally like to get more for less, so many people are duped by these offers.

I don't believe in overselling as it might (and probably will) put a strain on server resources, and if someone really uses what they need on the oversold plan, server performance will be greatly affected, making people angry and making you lose business.
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Exactly, well said Blikster
 
Realistically almost all webhosts "oversell" disk space the same way airlines over book flights. Very few sites use even close to the multiple gigabytes of bandwidth that come standard with even the cheapest accounts. If every account on a given shared hosting server maxed out it's disk quota, the hard drive would be full.

Back when I worked tech support for a host, I ran some statistics across all their shared hosting servers and found that the average site only used 5% of it's disk space quota. I imagine this is still true.

This said, offering unlimited resources is dishonest, especially considering the ToS that detail conditions for terminating said "unlimited" accounts usually due to CPU usage.
 
codingscape said:
Realistically almost all webhosts "oversell" disk space the same way airlines over book flights. Very few sites use even close to the multiple gigabytes of bandwidth that come standard with even the cheapest accounts. If every account on a given shared hosting server maxed out it's disk quota, the hard drive would be full.

Back when I worked tech support for a host, I ran some statistics across all their shared hosting servers and found that the average site only used 5% of it's disk space quota. I imagine this is still true.

This said, offering unlimited resources is dishonest, especially considering the ToS that detail conditions for terminating said "unlimited" accounts usually due to CPU usage.
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only 5% that doesn't sound right to me but you would know. I don't think overselling is bad unless you abuse the power like unlimited this unlimited that. If done right it a good it can be a great tool to have.
 
Over selling is a problem if you want offer what you say you offer, any big hosting company will tell you, CPU's can always be upgraded, Ram can always be added, and hard drive space (The Cheapest) can always be upgraded.
 
Overselling has been around for years. I'm only against this if the provider is oversaturating their ability to deliver contracted services. Again, it's best to read through their respective TOS and AUP before signing on. Even those promising unlimited space and bandwidth have limitations in the fine print.
 
Can any one calculate the financials required for a company to survive without overselling ? Is it viable for a business if there is no overselling ? Take an example of VPS companies, how much they spend on VPS nodes and how much they can gain ? What will be the support, power, office management, personal fee ? Calculate everything, if a company says that they do not oversell, really i dont belive it. It may be one man show that time you can give with minimum expected profit. :)
 
Everyone has their own opinion of overselling. So here's mne..
A few years back I was going back and forth about the entire thing. Weighing pros and cons, and asking advise everywhere I could. Over at WHT everyone SEEMED to have the same opinion.. "it's bad, don't do it, blah blah blah.." Normally I would have left it at that as WHT is a very rich method of feedback, and I trust many members emensily.

At the time I was working for Bluehost, and CEO Matt Heaton had been giving me pointers here and there about starting my own host. He first explained why so many other hosts were against overselling without even having experience with it. It's because they can't do it, they realize it's a goldmine if managed well, but they just don't have the resources to back it up.

The oversold customers that legitamately use 500GB storage and 25TB bandwidth would cost a host thousands a month, but all the customers who use 5MB storage and 100MB bandwidth make hosts like Bluehost millions a month.

BH can offer all that and 24/7 phone support because of overselling. I doubt any of us can offer that, so even though it doesn't make sense as part of my business model to oversell, my hat's off to the hosts that do it well.
 
When you are talking about overselling on space and bandwidth it usually refers to both of them being displayed as "Unlimited". This terms comes to be very misleading because if you try use many resources guess what ? They will suspend your account as soon as they see you are using x amount fof space or band.
 
siforek said:
The oversold customers that legitamately use 500GB storage and 25TB bandwidth would cost a host thousands a month, but all the customers who use 5MB storage and 100MB bandwidth make hosts like Bluehost millions a month.
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I wonder if companies like Bluehost do have customers that use X,xxx-XX,xxx GB of bandwidth every month and if those customers are indeed "untouched" by the company.

It would seem that "managing overselling" is company's ability to kick off and terminate those customers that start using the resources included in their plan. Its a game of muscle - a multi-million dollar company with many lawyers versus an average webmaster.
 
Artashes said:
I wonder if companies like Bluehost do have customers that use X,xxx-XX,xxx GB of bandwidth every month and if those customers are indeed "untouched" by the company.

It would seem that "managing overselling" is company's ability to kick off and terminate those customers that start using the resources included in their plan. Its a game of muscle - a multi-million dollar company with many lawyers versus an average webmaster.
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I can verify that if a customer "legitimately" uses 100% of their resources they will be "untouched". The tricky part is whenever we'd see people using 20-30GB+ 99.9% of the time they had illegal content, pirated software, etc.. So that's an easy terminate.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but all who have posted "overselling is bad", "the companies who do it are scamming people" etc.. IMO you're all ignorant, following a trend, and likely just VERY jealous. In no way am I trying to flame here.. Until you run a successful, multimillion dollar hosting company, you should bow down to those who have thousands of happy customers, their own DC(or 5) and just happen to drive a $500k car.

To sum it all up:
Overselling CAN be bad if done by "n00bs". "Oversellers" that know what they're doing will forever have my ear, and a much larger bank account than I. Don't oversell with less than $500k to invest(or so I've been told).
 
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