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If you have been paying attention to the matter of web hosting in recent times you will probably have seen the term "overselling" and, depending on your experience you may either nod your head sagely or scratch it and wonder what it means. In order to clear matters up we have taken a look at the overselling trend and explain it here in simple terms. (Note: shared hosting means that your websites are stored on a server with a number of other customers sites and that all resources are shared by the customers on that server).

Web hosting companies usually promote their shared hosting services with "figures" and parameters of the hosting packages they are offering. Storage space on offer, monthly data transfer (bandwidth) limits etc. and although for most professionals this gives a fair indication of what kind of sites the service can support, the marketing philosophy is usually based on the belief that many people lack the knowledge to translate the meanings of the numbers and simply go for the biggest. In an attempt to outdo one another a lot of hosts have raised the numbers game to rather silly levels. On the face of it, some of these offerings just look too good to be true and in reality, they are. We have taken some hypothetical numbers for this exercise and you will often see far bigger numbers bandied about. Sometimes numbers are replaced by one word but we hope most people realize that hosting resources never can, and never will be, "unlimited".

Just by way of example, (and this is pretty arbitrary) let’s say that a company is offering 100GB of storage for $10 per month. If they are using entry level servers rather than high-end equipment which is far more expensive, their hard disk may perhaps be capable of storing around 400GB of data (based on current technology) and assuming that all that space was given over to storing customers content, they could host 20 accounts with 20GB of space, generating $200 monthly revenue. At that rate it would take over a year to even cover the cost of the server, and remember, our theoretical company is offering 100GB per user, not 20GB. Think about it - just four customers per server for $40 per month income would make the hosting company far more than a charity!

Realistically, few users can use more than 1-2 GB of space and most will probably need less than 100MB. If a customer did manage to gobble up 20GB of storage, hundreds of others will not, effectively subsidizing the few people who actually did manage to upload such huge amounts of content. (think about your own computer’s hard disk space and how much data it is capable of storing and what a tiny fraction of that would be used were you to make a backup of your site(s) - I think my last full backup was a shade over 20mb.

The offer from our fictitious company also includes 300GB of data transfer. So, let’s just say that most use around half that - 150GB - which means that around 200 sites could be served by a 100MBs line each one using the complete capacity of a half a megabit carrier - if the offer made was actually used by all customers, the hosting fees would not even cover the bandwidth costs! The truth is that almost none of the customers would need anywhere close to this amount of data transfer.

Basically, by overselling, the hosting companies are offering a service that they are pretty confident you won’t use; certainly one that they don’t want you to use and consequentially won’t ever allow you to use.

Let’s try and translate a few more numbers to give a very rough idea of your likely usage and visitor traffic. We’ll assume that you are going to use your 300GB bandwidth every month, 10GB every day, and we will assume that each visitor you receive results in a download of half a megabyte of data - that means that in the 15 hours a day of peak traffic times you would have 15,0000 visitors. This is a VERY rough example (the nature of internet traffic being what it is) but hopefully it illustrates just what a high traffic site you would be talking about, and how unlikely your business is ever going to need such resources. The point is, that no shared hosting account can handle a site of such magnitude so why do they offer these huge numbers as selling points? Is it deceptive or just good marketing?

If you are a potential customer, just remember that the offers will always be qualified by limitations set our elsewhere in the terms of service - not necessarily "small print" but something that so many people never read. The hypothetical situations outlined above will be prevented from ever becoming a reality by setting certain limits such as no two consecutive days in excess of x amount of bandwidth usage, no more than x hits per second to your site, database connection limits, database size limitations and individual file size limitations just to name a few.

Human nature being what it is, wanting something for nothing is something that marketers have long exploited and in such a hugely competitive industry, overselling was perhaps almost an inevitability, the snowball effect carrying many along with it.

In some ways, these overselling tactics by companies can be counter productive but when the competition steps up, market forces dictate the path for many. The forums are full of people bad mouthing hosts for shutting off their service ’without warning’ and often it is because of the perceived promises and lack of understanding of the real limits. Is it the fault of the host or the customer? It really takes two to tango as they say, but overselling to a market with limited knowledge of the product is a recipe for poor publicity and bad feeling when things come home to roost. Does this help either party? No, it doesn’t, but oversell is, at least for now, here to stay and although companies who oversell cannot simply be categorized as "bad hosts" it re-enforces the old caveat of "buyer beware".

Of course, there are still those that don’t oversell, or at least not to the ludicrous extent of others, and maybe you should seek out a shared hosting deal that costs a little more but backs up it’s service with a solid infrastructure of hardware, service and support. Balance your desire for "cheap" with an equally strong desire for "quality" and you’re on the right path to finding a host with whom you can be a happy and satisfied customer.

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