Overselling in Web Hosting Industry
Posted in Web Hosting News on Jul 1st, 2010
Overselling means to sell one’s service beyond what is intended to deliver.
The term simply refers to the web hosting services that sold off its services such as the standard size of bandwidth, disk space and memory completely to his available clients. However upon noticing that on average, web-users do not use their allotted resources to their fullest potential- with this fraction of opportunity, the web host allowed for an additional numbers of customers to be staged on the same server with the same plan even when the server’s esources have been fully allocated to their existing customers.
As the cost of each plan is the same, having more clients registering for the plan will bring additional profits to the web host. With the same server with fixed amount of disk space and bandwidth, overselling in web hosting is very common today with the intention to gauge as much profits as possible. However rarely are there any web hosting companies which would admit about their overselling act. Reason being they are fully aware that overselling is not necessarily good and it is extremely unfair to your clients whom have been paying for the allocated services and resources that they have been paying for.
Problem with overselling
Despite the additional profits which the web host is able to get from overselling, there are certain risks which they need to face and settled in.
1. Though rare, there might be occasions where all of their clients on the same server are in need to utilize the maximum bandwidth that they have been “allocated” with. As a result, the web hosting company would have to pay for a very high rate, which is very much higher than the normal rate to get the additional bandwidth that its clients have used up.
2. When the host squeezed a higher than expected number of customers to host on the same server, this will badly affect the server processing time with the exhaustion of the server processing power even before their bandwidth are reached. This overuse of server resources will lead to accounts close down of the web hosting company.
3. Less experienced web hosting providers might try to oversell their space as well on top of their bandwidth. When overselling of website’ space is practiced, there is a very high risk of potential server downtime due to over-crowded server space.
4. Overselling has raised multiple ethical questions, on the integrity of the services as well as the concern of consumers paying for what they will not receive in return. This issue had received significant attention from the socialists and publics.
5. Overselling will eventually hurt and jeopardize the stability of the web server and will bring more harm than good to the web host itself. Big Issues arise when misuse of overselling continue to happen in the web hosting business, causing consistent server crash and unbearable down-time of the web server, leading many of their existing customers to move out from their service.
Some web hosting experts found themselves fine with the idea of overselling, however this activity need to be carried out cautiously with a defined plan. Overselling of web hosting is not good, nor is it bad either. Overselling is possible to happen in the web hosting but it is very much depends on the server, processor and the actual hosted website. Overselling had been overly done by many web host providers who had not being furnished with the right type of server for overselling their web hosting.
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