I felt that I should do a post as this situation is one we see every day of the week and s0 many people are caught out by it.
I am speaking of the “over selling” done by 50% of web hosts.
What is it ?
Overselling is where a host offers something but you will not infact ever manage to get that or anything near that. The most common oversell is data storage or bandwidth. If you look at bandwidth oversells you will see something like “10000 GB transfer on a 10mbps network”.
This looks as though you can transfer up to 10 mb every second for up to a total of 10000 GB each month. However what they will not tell you is that the 10 mb will be shared and you will only get full access to it at off peak times.
So you will only perhaps get 2mbps at peak times (when people will be viewing your site). This actually really limits you to 5000 GB each month. Yes an unbelievable amount, one most sites will never come anywhere near, but it immediatly shows you are being oversold.
Storage is a much worse situation as there will be many limits for your storage, terms to meet etc
10 GB storage. But files must be linked within 2 clicks to homepage, must be under a certain size.
Why is it bad ?
Overselling is not necessarily harmfull to you, for most people they will never notice it is happening but it can cause some extremelly bad problems.
- The main reason I feel it is bad is because you are paying for something (even if you dont use it) but you are not truelly being given what you pay for.
- It is also bad as you may decide to use your full storage amount to host your backup files (for your pc) or your music files so you can stream them to your mobile or laptop. But when you use the storage and the host bans you saying you are going against rules it may cost you to re-activate accounts or to release domains so that they can be transfered to a new host
Overselling can also cause trouble for the host themselves.
They will cram as many users as possible into a single server to save money. However when customers try to use full resources and realise that they cannot, many complaints will be made to the host.
Negative reviews will be posted on forums and review websites, not only hve they upset current customers but they may also loose the possible new customers.
This sort of explains what you need to know about this topic but if you need any more information leave a comment bellow (register first) and I will reply in comment and also personally for yourself via email.