Overselling is a big trend in the web-hosting world at
the moment. It’s an easy way to get more out of
your servers than normally is possible. The basic idea
of overselling is that the majority of your clients are
only going to use a fraction of the resources allocated
to them so there’s going to be a lot of wasted bandwidth
and space. Overselling involves taking a gamble and selling
more than you can handle assuming that the unused resources
will cover it.
Let’s say for example that a server hard drive
is 80GB and has 1200GB of bandwidth. The hosting company
has a look around and decides that to be competitive they
need to offer plans with 2GB of disk space and 40GB bandwidth.
With these figures they can only offer 30 hosting packages
per server. This leaves quite a bit of wasted disk space
and after a few months the company will probably notice
that their users aren’t using all of the available
bandwidth. Because of this the company then assumes that
it can safely sell at least 10 more packages on the one
server. If the original number of customers already covers
general costs then the extra packages provided by overselling
are pure profit.
The advantage of overselling for the host is that they
make more money off each server than they otherwise normally
would be able to. The advantage for the client is that
this extra revenue is usually transferred on (at least
in theory) by cheaper hosting packages with more features.
The problem is that these features are often ‘smoke
and mirrors’. A few users would be able to use their
entire allotment without any trouble, but if every single
client were to build their website up to maximum capacity
the host wouldn’t be able to handle the sudden increase
in demand without adding extra hard drives, buying more
bandwidth, or perhaps even another server. This would
most likely lead to a fair amount of downtime.
Web hosts aren’t going to advertise the fact that
they oversell. It’s not something that will gain
them customers and it’s likely to drive away a few.
In general however, they’re likely to get away with
it without any real problems. The reason the idea even
exists is that it is true that the majority of websites
don’t use all of the space that’s allocated
to them. The problem is that it’s not a particularly
honest way of dealing with clients. It’s a little
like the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ where
the host is just hoping that no one notices the fact that
a package is in fact a little nude.
Overselling will generally not be a problem unless a
host gets too greedy and ends up selling much more than
they could possibly provide for. On the other hand, it’s
not even necessary as the host can usually make enough
money to make ends meet without overselling. It will generally
be quite difficult for you to find out whether or not
a host oversells unless they specifically advertise it,
or they’re well known for having problems due to
excessive overselling. Just make sure you do some research
and choose a reliable host, not necessarily the one that
appears to offer ridiculous amounts of bandwidth or disk
space for far too little money.
About the Author
M6.Net Web Helpers
http://www.m6.net
Daniel Punch is a writer working at M6.Net: ‘The
web-hosting company for humans.’ M6.Net is working
hard to help humanity experience the power and freedom
to develop their own part of the Internet, to share their
information and connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime.
