Defining Overselling in Web Hosting

Overselling web hosting is among very hot topics to be discussed in the web world. By this way the providers can easily raise their income. Idea of Overselling generates due to the fact that there are number of clients using some part of the resources allocated to them due to which wastage of bandwidth and space is happening. In Overselling, the oversellers sell more than required to the customers assuming that the unused resources will cover it.

Example: if a server hard drive is 80GB and has 1200GB of bandwidth. The hosting company thereafter decides that in order to be competitive they require offering plans with 2GB of disk space and 40GB bandwidth. Various calculations enable them to just offer 30 hosting packages per server. This results in the wastage of disk space and later on company will get to know that users are using only some part of their allotted bandwidth. Considering this the company then assumes that it can safely sell at least 10 more packages on the single server. Thus if the original number of customers already covers general costs then the extra packages provided by overselling are net profit.

The benefit of overselling for the host is that by this way they are able to raise their profit level drastically and on the other hand, the clients get an impression that overselling is generating extra revenue which is usually transferred on by cheaper hosting packages having more features which is practically not at all correct as these features are often ‘smoke and mirrors’. Sometimes it happens that few users use their entire allotment without any complications but if every individual starts to build his/her website up to maximum capacity, then in that case the host would be in trouble as he would not be in a position to manage that sudden increase in demand without adding extra hard drives, buying more bandwidth, or perhaps even another server. And this would lead to most of the time, the downtime.

The Web hosts never discloses about their overselling as this will lead to decrease in their customers. However generally its not very difficult to get the clients as it is a clear that most of the clients under utilize their space but the problem remains as it is not considered a particularly honest way of dealing with clients. It can be compared to andEmperor’s New Clothes' where the host is trying to hide the fact that a package is in fact a little nude.

Overselling will not be considered as a problem until and unless a host gets too gluttonous and started selling much more than they could possibly provide for. However on the other hand, it's not even necessary as the host can usually generate sufficient amount of money to make ends meet without overselling. Thus it is very difficult for one to find out the fact that the host is overselling until and unless they specifically advertise it, or already in the market, the host is well known for having problems due to excessive overselling. So the only mantra is one should always do his/her homework properly and should do some research and select a reliable host, not necessarily the one that appears to offer ludicrous amounts of bandwidth or disk space for quite cheap.