Hosting and Overselling. OR Why you shouldn't cheap out on hosting
 

For those looking for hosting and for those enticed by the cheap plans offered by companies like Dreamhost, I recommend you take 5-10 minutes and read these two articles.

If you were running a brick and mortar business, your website would be like your storefront. You wouldn't try to save a few bucks by building your storefront with scrap metal in a seedy part of town, because you'd end up losing customers. Why would you do something similar with your website?

http://whreviews.com/overselling-hosting.htm
http://whreviews.com/shared-hosting-res.htm

thanks for the articles, reading them now :)

An article about hosting is pretty useless to someone who doesn't need hosting.

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

let's find an article on surfing .....:2 cents:

Theres a guy selling 20 gig of space and 1 TERRABYTE of bw. Can you imagine what would happen to his servers if his clients actually used its allowance?

Nice read thanks for the knowledge but cheap is only good when it comes to hookers!!!

He'd can them all for abusing server resources. It's a common practice at hosts like Dreamhost.

And booze! :thumbsup

Thank you for helping educate webmasters, as a host I appreciate that :)

It's hard not to over sale since it's so common and people fall for it. But we never have and never will, in fact like allot of hosts on GFY we offer the lowest price without needing to lower our quality of service.

I love when people are like.. for $100 a month you get a 100mbit unmetered pipe.. and so do 1000 other people.. on that same pipe! so each of you get 1/2 a mbit... if your lucky

Can you imagine their biz model may be based on many people not actually using all that bandwidth and disk storage, from their past experience?

Can you imagine what would happen to its biz if an "All you can eat" restaurant's customers actually eat all its food?
Yet, this doesn't happen, otherwise there will be no such restaurant anylonger ... However, you are attracted by such a place since you know you have no limit, yet you don't use a lot ...

I would also recommend reading the article on ultracheaphosts.com

hivelocity.net and fdcservers.net are two hosts that oversell massively

Overselling is encouraged, and it's only practical especially on shared web. Most are not going to be using near about the maximum of what they pay for, which translates into the host allowing more people on per server and thusly they are able to handle more per server, ultimately driving down prices. Overselling by 10-20% is fairly common for nearly *all* shared web hosts, and you?ll never even notice. What starts to suck is when the hosts get ultra-greedy (and competitive) and starts overselling by 35-40% or more? everybody starts to suffer at that point.

overselling should only be on shared hosting, and it should be a server to server case senario. We gauage our shared servers on a average load over the time of weeks and watch the graphs to see progression. Theres a happy medium between profit and server stability. Some hosts just like the side of profit more than stability and angry customers. You can have good profit and happy customers at the same time its really not hard to do.

I'm shocked that a few hosts have not posted in this thread