We hear alot of talk about Overselling. So what is overselling?
We’ll get the definition from a 3rd party source: Wikipedia :
Overselling is a term used in the web hosting industry to describe a situation in which a company provides hosting plans that are unsustainable if every one of its customers uses the full extent of services advertised. The term is usually referred to the web space and bandwidth transfer allowance.
In lameman’s terms, overselling is selling more resources than one has available. Generally this is related to disk space, and data transfer, but can be applied to CPU, Ram, number of domains, and the list goes on and on.
So the next question is, why would you oversell? It’s purely marketing. The web hosting industry is extremely competitive. So hosts offer extremely large amounts of disk space, and bandwidth in order to remain competitive – and appeal to the masses. This is probably the reason that you will begin seeing more and more web hosts offering ‘unlimited’ resources. How can that be possible? What’s the catch? Simply put, it’s all in the fine print. Terms of Service (TOS) generally restrict the consumer on other resources, primarly CPU and Ram usage.
The web hosts know that most users will use only a small percentage of the allotted resources. And if they even get close to using a decent amount of resources, the account will be suspended for breaking the TOS in regards to CPU and Ram usage.
So what’s the benefit to the consumer?
Consumers benefit from the competition among hosts. No longer is the consumer limited to low disk space and bandwidth limits. No longer do you have to hunt for a hosting company purely based on the given resources. Now you have a choice. In reality, it’s forcing web hosts to focus more on customer service and support. This is the biggest benefit to the consumer.
Does WebHostingPeriod oversell?
Yes we do. As mentioned previously, this is one way that we remain competitive in the industry. However, our level of service is in no way lacking as a result. Our efforts are even more focused on customer service and support than ever before – as we feel this is the best way to set ourselves apart from the competition.