In the web-hosting world, overselling has become a big trend. It is an easy way to get more out of your servers than normally possible. Overselling just means that a majority of your clients are going to use a fraction of the resources allocated to them, which means that there is going to be a lot of wasted bandwidth and space. Overselling is all about gambling and selling more than you can handle by assuming that the unused resources will cover it.
If a server hard drive is 80GB and it has 1200GB of bandwidth, the web hosting company has to look around and thus decide that in order to be competitive they will need to offer plans with 2GB of disk space and 40GB bandwidth. These figures will only allow them to offer 30 hosting packages per server. This would mean leaving wasted disk space. After a few months the web hosting company will probably notice that their users are not using all of the available bandwidth. The company will then assume that it can safely sell at least 10 more packages on the server. If the original number of customers already covers the general costs, the extra packages provided by overselling will be pure profit.
Overselling comes with some advantages. The host, for example, ends up making more money off each server than they normally would. The client enjoys the advantage having the extra revenue transferred on (at least in theory) by cheaper hosting packages with more features. Only a few users would be able to use their entire allotment without any trouble, however if every client were to build their website up to maximum capacity, the host wouldn’t e able to handle the sudden increase in demand without adding extra hard drives, buying more bandwidth or acquiring another server. This would most likely increase downtime.
Since overselling is likely to drive away customers, web hosting providers don’t usually advertise the fact that they oversell. The idea of overselling exists simply because the majority of websites don’t use all of the space that is allocated to them. This is not an honest way of dealing with clients.
All in all, overselling will not be a problem unless a web host gets too greedy and ends up selling much more than they could possibly provide for. Overselling is not even necessary, since the web host can usually make enough money to make ends meet without overselling. Finding out whether or not a web host oversells, will be almost impossible, unless the host specifically advertises it or if they have a reputation for having problems due to excessive overselling. All you can do is just choose a reliable web hosting provider, not necessarily one that appears to offer ridiculous amounts of bandwidth or disk space for a small amount of money.
