Overselling - Good and Bad
Overselling is a term that is being thrown around in hosting related forums and articles way too often. It means, that someone is selling more, then they can provide. Generally, this refers to bandwidth and disk space, however recently this is also the case with CPU as well. So why overselling is bad and why it is good?
First off overselling is great for web hosting companies. When someone vists a website and sees there 500GB of disk at 15TB transfer for $5, they think: nice, what value for money. And yes, it would have been were it true. This is great for web hosts though, as customers usually fall for this and buy the package.
Now, lets look at this from the customer perspective:
Good things
- It is common, that people over estimate their hopes in terms of website planning: You might think initially, that ok, I think my website will need 500GB transfer per month, but end up using up only 500MB. The same goes for disk space: on average people use 50MB of space for their websites. Sometimes, however 1 person decides to use those 500GB and if the host has,say 1TB of space in the server that one person can get away with using all the limit completely. So this is good for that one person.
- Also, it’s great because you are getting more for less (especially, that happy person with 500GB for $5)
Bad Things
- It is not fair to customers. Basically hosting providers are lying in a sense, that they cannot possibly deliver what they are advertising (to everyone).
- Servers are usually overloaded. If you used such hosting providers previously, then you surely know how slow cPanel was loading or how slow your website was at times.
- You might get suspended for using too much resources easily: suppose your site was digged (digg effect) and you started receiving thousands of visitors. You will be instantly suspended for this, as the server was working on it’s limit even before this happened.
- It’s also unethical: every customer get’s taken for a ride by the hosting provider.
Tags: web hosting