What Is Overselling?
A description of overselling and its problems
Overselling is a growing and widespread problem in the web hosting industry. It began when companies decided to offer ridiculously large amounts of disk space and then even "unlimited" disk space when in fact such offers are not even possible. In the world of computers, disk space can never be "unlimited".
To put this in better perspective, let's look at a typical web server these overselling web hosts put customers on. An example server might have 3000 GB of space, and have 600 people on it. A typical overselling host would offer at least 100 GB of space to each of its users - only enough to cover 30 of the 600 people on the server if they should decide to use all of their space. Frankly, you aren't necessarily going to get what you're supposedly paying for.
But it doesn't stop there, things get worse. Let's say you actually decide to test the limits, and see if you CAN use the 100 GB of space. Chances are the web host will have all sorts of little conditions in their terms of service that are put there for the sole purpose of keeping you from reaching 100 GB of usage. The end result? The host will suspend your account and send you packing, typically without even giving you a refund.
But wait, there's more! The simple fact that hosts load 600 customers on a single machine is bad in itself. This is obvious overcrowding, and also a huge security concern. Rather than only 100 or so people on a machine, which you will typically find on a non-overselling web host, there are 600 on a machine (and sometimes a whole lot more)! This makes the chance of someone else being an abusive user/having an insecure website increase by 600%, which results in a 600% decrease in reliability, which in turn can result in loss of business and visitors due to website downtime (people are more likely to be UNABLE to access your website).
Thus, to sum things up, overselling is a misleading and shady practice that ultimately hurts you and your website/business. However, in today's web hosting industry it has become the norm, and most major companies use it as part of their marketing campaigns. Of course, out of those web hosts that oversell (which is most of them), there are the good and the bad, which we help you with here through our rankings. However, we would prefer to direct you to at least one high quality non-overselling web host, which is why our top spot in the rankings goes to Hostamina.com.
