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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
Daniel Punch - M6.Net Web Helpers - 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.
Contact:
M6.net
daniel punch
danielp@m6.net
1-866-496-6638
www.m6.net |
