Hi All,
We have a small reseller hosting package and came up against a bit of a wall. Upon setting up a new account, I found that it couldn't be done as our allocated bandwidth had been reached. I was unaware of this as my partner set up our service.

I check their website and for our package this is how it's stated:
Bandwidth: 100 Gigabytes per month

That, to me, is not saying anything about allocating amounts. Obviously they are not allowing over selling. Someone tell me how you can create web space without over selling?? Don't you HAVE to over sell the amount of bandwidth so a user doesn't get caught short?

Here's the icing on the cake. Our total bandwidth usage for Jan 2007 was 4 gigs. We don't have clients that are using a heap of bandwidth.

Well I'm not happy with this at all and I will have a word with them to see if they come up with something satisfactory for us. I've not been really happy with downtime that seems a little over the norm for this provider.

Any input appreciated.

The best suggestion I can give you is reduce the amount of bandwidth allocated to other accounts. For exapmle if your reseller account has 100 GB of bandwidth included, you can not create 5 accounts with 25 GB of transfer. It does not matter if the first 4 accounts only use 4 GB per month. When you set up the account you gave them 25 GB of bandwidth and they can use it if they wish.
Lets say you provider did allow overselling and you created 12 accounts with 25 GB of bandwidth. Now lets assume by the 20th of the month the 100 GB you got with your account was gone. All your accounts are automatically suspended as there is no transfer left on your account. Your clients are mad at you. And if you are this upset with your provider for not allowing overselling, I can assure you you would be very upset when all your clients were yelling at you. You would think your provider was ruining your company and putting you out of business. I think the current situation is much better for both of you.
Now if you are experiencing excessive downtimes, you have a very legitimate complaint there.

Thanks for your response galaxy,

Our packages are not to oversell our business. I believe they are reasonable .... my point of overselling is ..... you HAVE TO .. my thinking ..... you will know this ..... your clients have to have MORE than they will EVER use. ....... but ..... they NEVER USE IT ..... I know .... catch 22 ..... and if my clients look at this forgive me .. hehe

My point was it was surprising ...... but I cant reduce the bandwidth I sold my clients with ..... Im not sure if they would like it ..... but answer could be no ...

What you say is true for our account ...... I didnt realize we offer a gold package that we can only have 2. My thinking is ..... we are not using the bandwidth ..... or am I crazy .......... isnt used bandwidth more important to anyone? I admit ..... I am faily new at this ......... I do need to learn. But me quick learner ......

Ok new thought quick ..... we dont mind upgrading our account as more business comes in ..... gee ..... win win ...... but I'm not really happy ... Ok I will see what comes next. Never want the few people we have not happy. It's more than the hosting ......

Thanks again ....... still welcome to more thoughts.

You need to ask your host to turn on overselling so you can sell more BW than you actually consume.

Although beware of this becuase it can be easier to exceed the BW alotment you have if you start overselling it. Overselling BW is better than overselling space. Most clients do not use the space or BW they buy but this is more true with BW. Overselling BW really does not effect the server as much as overselling space.

Then you do not have to change your packages or affect what you already have given out.

For obvious reasons, when overselling is enabled, the service (of similar quality) would have to be more expensive. So, generally, there's a trade off. Your provider surely took into account these things when pricing its plans. I doubt they will set overselling enabled, as this policy is and integral part of their business model.

That's certainly a no-no.

Oh, you should be aware that your domain's whois easily points to your provider. That is of course, if your target market cares for/knows about such things.

Thanks again for all the input.
It is really appreciated.

I still haven't had an opportunity to chat with our hosts about our situation.
Just to keep beating a dead horse lol ........ we don't offer radical bandwidth .... you know ..... in hopes that 80% won't use it. In fact as most of you know, it is really hard to compete out there. You look at plans at $1.00 per month with 500 megs space and 50 gig BW ........ I mean crazy ..... but will they be here in a year. We host a number of local businesses for me ..... so I am personally involved so no matter what, we will keep this going. We're just cheap lol

We actually went from a dedicated server down to this reseller stuff. Just didn't have the client base to afford it. I've been looking at some Virtual Server plans .... I think it may be time to go up from there.
( Don't worry guys/girls ...... I'm looking here first )

It really comes down to how YOU want to run your business and how your provider wants to run theirs. If overselling bandwidth is important to you, maybe you need a new provider.

We personally do not allow our servers to be oversold. We can make enough profit and try to keep a bit more control on a server once it fills up. At the beginning, you are only useing 4Gb, in a year, those same 4 or however many accounts you host may each be up to 20 or 30Gbs, now you will be glad that you spread things out a bit more.

A VPS may be a great place for you to be as you can control everything then. The same as a dedicated except for resources of course and it does not sound like you need a dedicated so VPS is a great choice.

Well I spoke with our host ........ I found this interesting.
We would have thought that having a reseller account, this should be enabled. Ok fine, so it wasn't, they quoted the feature, but didn't say if it cost any more or anything else. I don't know, I just find that strange. I haven't written back because we have decided to leave. I don't want to find out that enabling the reseller feature costs us an extra $20 per month with the other frustrations I've been having lately.

Our decision to leave was based more on the outages we've been getting. Constant hang times on our cPanel, site loading, FTP transfers ..... their server must be loaded to the brim. I know this because I work daily on our hosted sites, so I'm the first to be aware of how bad these problems have become. Then when you start to get clients compaining, I think it's time.

Maybe we just got spoiled with a DS but WickedShark, you're right, we didn't need one but at first, it was just to host one application ..... which has since been sold. We ended up just using the server, and now it turned into the hosting site.

So, we are leaning toward a Virtual Server Plan or a reliable reseller.

Thanks to all who responed.
I will be posting our requirements in the requests folder later.

No, not at all. It doenst matter what "limits" you place on a client, if they can and want to use it they will - its got nothing to do with overselling.

Overselling simply menas you are allowed to allocate more transfer resource than you actually have - in other words to sell something you cant actually provide.

So, instead of your client getting shutdown for exceeding their quota, affecting one site, if they use all your accounts' quotas, all your sites get shut down.

Now that may be fine for you, but I doubt the other clients will be impressed.

Managed properly, oversellingc an work for some business - but most people just use it to cram more customers on as they've priced their entire operation incorrectly. IMHO its a poor way to run a service, so we dont allow it on our reseller accounts.

Ok, maybe I'm using the term overseller in the wrong context when referring to a client.
You do NOT want your clients to run out of bandwidth and wake up to ugly error messages. So how do you make sure that doesn't happen? You monitor the needs of the site then oversell an amount of bandwidth. If a client is using 1.99 gig bandwidth average per month, I surely wouldn't NOT have them set up on a 2 gig plan. In fact, if one of our clients came up to anywhere in the 75% / 80% range of bandwidth, I would be recomending to move up to a larger plan.

Does that make sense?

I mean that we don't intend on overselling the crap out of our business but as our client base increase, so will we.

Anyway, to stop beating a dead horse, we have found a good reseller which suited our needs perfectly.

No.

You dont *oversell* them anything, you *allocate* them some more bandwidth, or *upgrade* them to the next plan size, or *suspend* their site, or *investigate* where its all gone, or whatever your terms & conditions say.

This is *nothing* to do with overselling, and everything to do with managing your business and customers.

Overselling in my experience, leads to poor server performance, excessive downtime, annoyed clients with impossible expectations, and is practiced by hosts whom IMHO are looking to make a quick buck, not provide a decent service.

Not overselling IME means higher pricing, gives better support to the end clients, less "muppets" trying to use the service by only attacting clients who at least think they know what they're doing, and implies a sustainable long term business model.

Neither of which has any impact to what to do when a client exceeds their resource allocations - which is a relationship management issue not an overseling one :p