Overselling

Have you heard the word “Overselling”? What does that mean? Is it necessary for you to know about it? Yes! OVER-SELL-ING means selling a product beyond the limitation. What does it do with the web hosting? It has the key for the server performance. In the web hosting arena it is mainly talks about the disk space and bandwidth.

Let me give you an example for more understanding. A web hosting provider might have a server with 10GB hard drive and 100GB of bandwidth.  The provider starts to sell the product with a package; 1GB disk space and 10GB bandwidth for 150$ USD. 10 clients have bought the plans and the hosting provider is now has sold the complete server. The income is 1500$ USD. But then the company has identified the total usage of the disk and bandwidth is 5GB and 70GB only for the past 5 months by their 10 customers. In this situation ‘OVERSELLING’ plays its role.

The particular web hosting provider tends to sell more 20 or 1000 plans from the same server assuming their clients wouldn’t use the total allocated space and bandwidth for them every month. They are particularly selling their clients’ allocated space to others. The hosting provider may earn double or triple income on the same server. OR the hosting provider may tends to offer the plan at the cheapest price since a server ‘can’ accommodate more than 1000 websites but did anyone think about the server performance?

This gambling or over usage may go in a smooth way without clients realising it. But, there will be symptoms soon or later. The problem will arise when there are some or most of the clients’ sites get high traffics or peak hours at a same time. The extra bandwidth is engaged with other web sites on the same server.  In the result, the server will have the difficulties to performe better as it doesn’t have enough bandwidth to support the websites.

There are certain hosting provider give priority for the quality of the server performance and the satisfaction of the customers. Meanwhile some clients give the importance for their website speed and more concern on the downtime. The quota or the prices paying by these clients will be higher but guarantee of the technical support and server uptime will be there for them.

P.S. Does the meaning of the word ‘unlimited’ exist?