What does server overselling mean?
Put simply, sever overselling is when a web hosting company sells more disk space or monthly transfer (bandwidth) than a server is able to accommodate.
Many websites sign up for a shared hosting plan that offers them more resources than they need, often as they want to allow for future expansion. As a result, servers are not being used in their full capacity. Web hosting companies are aware of this, and sometimes add extra web sites to the server, in a bid to utilize the space and make more additional income from the server. This is how server overselling comes about.
There are several negative results of server overselling. The performance of the server is likely to be reduced in speed and performance – sometimes quite drastically. This affects all of the sites that are running on that particular serve. There can also be interruptions, and sometimes even server crashes – meaning every single affected website will not be available to view until the sever is up and running again. As you can imagine, these are extremely annoying issues for the web site owners and administrators.
The reason why the web hosting companies sometimes oversell can be put down purely to money. By putting more web sites on a server they are maximizing the income from that server. Here is an example:
A hosting company has a server with a total of 1000GB of bandwidth and 120GB of hard disk space. A standard hosting plan offers customers 50GB of bandwidth and 4 GB of disk space, meaning they can host 20 websites on this server, with 40GB of disk space remaining.
Rather than let this 40Gb go to waste, the hosting company oversell – and allow another 10 sites to run through this server. This reduces the amount of bandwidth that everyone is actually getting, but results in more 50% income for the web hosting company.
Due to the fact that many sites do not use their allocated amount of bandwidth, it is unlikely that anyone will notice that the server has been oversold. The advantage for customers is that they sometimes get cheaper monthly packages as a result – though this depends on whether the hosting company is passing on the savings to the customers.
Obviously web hosting companies do not advertise the fact that they oversell, and it is almost impossible to find out which companies are doing this. But by searching the Internet you can often find out about the reliability and reputation of a company, and this is often a good indicator. Articles such as these will usually be found on forums or in chat rooms. As with most things, do your research before committing to a web hosting plan – if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.