Because the VPS technology doesnt know or care wat you've "bought" from your upstream, so how/why would it stop you overselling ?

You might be on a Celero-128 with 1Gb/month transfer allowance, but you could sell VPS's with 1000000Gb/month transfer - the virtualisation technology wont care.

Generally I see people moving to VPS from shared for some (perceived and usually non-existant) benefit, or simply because they're too tight to pay for a dedicated server - after all if you can get a VPS for $9.95 with 128Mb Ram, 250Gb space, 2000Gb transfer, surely that's as good as a DualQuadCore with 16Gb RAM and RAID-10 disks at $995/month

I have never heard of VPS verselling before. It seems new in VPS area

Alot of VPS providers do oversell and it is a good thing customers are becoming aware of it. When purchasing a VPS it would be a good idea to submit a ticket and ask a provider if they oversell.

If only bandwidth is oversold, there shouldn't be much issue. Real stuff comes when committed memory is oversold and nodes have a load of 40+ all the times.

when everyone use the VPS to the max, then the host will be alarmed. hehe

Most VPS systems donot allow overselling. In case someone found a way around this through some hacking or custom coding, this is unethical (though debatable).I can assure you from the best of my knowledge not many providers will oversell. I personally find the thought of that swell my stomach and make me sick.

I disagree. Most all of Virtuozzo and OpenVZ hosts are overselling. Xen can't oversell Ram, but there's nothing stopping the host from overselling other resources, like disk. The overselling of a VPS is not necessarily a bad thing. If done responsibly the end user probably won't even notice. The fact is, about 2% of customers will try to use what is actually given to them. Overselling effectively increases Supply with little (remember, we're talking about overselling responsibly here) to no performance decrease.

Can overselling make a clients experience bad? Yes, it's definitely possible. We are still talking about shared resources, so if the host isn't actively monitoring and balancing, nodes can become loaded. But again, as long as it's not abused the end user probably won't even notice.

The VPS market is growing daily, and competition is getting fierce. Big guys like GoDaddy and 1&1 got into VPS for their share of the market, although they don't seem to have their act together yet and tend to get not-so-favorable reviews. Hosts need to make money, plain and simple. If they don't, why would they want to offer their service. Without overselling the hosts have to lease resources at a premium. With overselling and the increased supply, prices come down.

People tend to boo-hoo overselling resources, but most don't want to pay a lot either. Some would rather pay more and know what they're getting, and there are hosts out there that accommodate that. The majority though, want to pay as little as possible.

Lucky them, they have advertising budgets to put their name in front of millions of customers who don't look for reviews. Being a big company with an easily recognized brand, has its perks.

No arguments here.
What I meant by that was that the vps market is getting increasingly competitive, and hosts that aren't targeting clients who want to pay a premium have to keep their prices competitive. Overselling makes that possible.

There are definitely a lot of VPS hosts out there now overselling. It seems to be getting worse as more and more unexperienced VPS hosts start up which is causing a lot of price competition which is making more hosts consider overselling to be a good strategy.

It's not long before it could be as bad as the shared market:
5TB RAM
5TB Disk Space
5TB Bandwidth
only $5/month



I know, an exaggeration, but maybe not too far off...

Many VPS providers out there (like us) now provide money back guarantees. If the service is slow or not to your liking, leave and find another provider.

Many providers out there probably do oversell, but you can see this easily in the disk IO of your VPS. If writing to the disk seems slow, its probably oversold.

If you don't like the performance or value of your VPS, vote with your feet!

Overloaded does not equal Oversold, nor the other way around.

Oversold doesnt have to be overloaded, but if the server is overloaded without much load from the owners sites, can't it be assumed oversold??

Yes however some company's prefer more customers then more satisfied customers. I would never oversell its just bad business model.

There are tons of ways to oversell. Customer reviews and some research goes a long way.