Overselling is a common practice in the web hosting world, which involves selling more space or resources than are actually available. In other words, an overselling host promises their customers more space or resources than they can provide.

Overselling can involve different types of resources, such as disk space, bandwidth, number of domains or email addresses, number of databases or number of FTP accounts. Hosts who oversell tend to promise their customers unlimited amounts of these resources, or offer hosting packages with extremely high amounts of resources at very low prices.

In theory, overselling could allow hosts to offer their customers more flexibility and adapt to their needs more effectively. However, in practice, overselling can cause serious performance and stability problems for hosted websites. If a host sells more space or resources than are actually available, this can lead to resource overload and decreased performance. Also, if a host is unable to meet the needs of all of its customers, this can lead to a higher likelihood of outages or downtime.

Overselling can be particularly problematic for hosts that use virtualization systems, such as virtual private servers (VPS) or Dedicated Servers virtual. In these cases, hosts may sell the same space or resources to multiple customers, thus creating a competitive situation for resources. If one or more customers use excessive amounts of resources, this can cause system overload and decreased performance for other customers.

To avoid these problems, it's important to choose a host that doesn't oversell and can guarantee enough resources to meet the needs of its customers. Furthermore, it is advisable to opt for hosting packages with the amount of resources appropriate to your needs, so as to avoid paying for resources that you will never use.

This is a gray area of ​​companies that is used to maximize ROI. The practice of overselling also prevails in the web hosting industry and has almost the same effects as those in other industries.

At the level of operational research, we could say that overselling embodies the famous saying "Maximizing profits, minimizing costs", however we must always keep in mind that the quality of the service must remain excellent and that it is always better and more profitable entrepreneurially speaking. , provide a quality service that brings added value to the customer, rather than a mediocre service that brings no value or even harms the customer.

What is web hosting overselling?

Overselling as we have already mentioned above can be done for any type of web hosting especially shared hosting and VPS. Let's consider the shared hosting instance. In shared hosting many websites are hosted on a physical server and all the resources are pooled and distributed among the users of the same server. Even though each user is assigned a maximum resource limit, web hosting providers regularly monitor server usage and know that all users are not using the maximum available resources.

In reality, the full resources of the server are barely used by the users and if in case the server is underallocated, the hosting provider will continue to add users to the server. In this case, the hosting provider is selling the resources it no longer has, this is overselling.

Web hosting overselling has become more important with unlimited web hosting packages. In an unlimited web hosting package, the web hosting provider does not define the exact amount of resources that the wall should be allocated to each customer. Even if the hosting package is promoted unlimited, this may not be the reality. That said, there are also hosting providers who offer genuine unlimited web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to read the web hosting company's terms of service (TOS) before signing up for any unlimited web hosting package.

Overselling web hosting providers rely on the belief that users are not very wise. If the user's website is up and running, the loading times seem ok, and there is no downtime or outage, the user will continue to be satisfied with the service. If overselling is done to the extreme, it can have detrimental effects on the quality of the service provided. Hosting more and more users on a single server (crowding users) until the server can no longer bear the load will result in a catastrophic situation and there will be many angry customers who will no longer trust the hosting provider.

While overselling is one way hosting companies try to get a higher return on their investment, it's a risky move and can cause long-term damage to the hosting company's name and trustworthiness.

Overselling in practice

To give you a better example of overselling, we'll reproduce a typical scenario that is fairly common in the industry. Let's say hosting provider X has 100GB of free disk space and 1500GB of bandwidth each month to sell. They offer a single package that includes 5GB of disk space and 75GB of bandwidth per customer; this means they can actually hire a total of 20 clients.

Now, it is quite common for most of their customers to not use their monthly deductible and have unused disk space and bandwidth. For the sake of argument, let's assume that each client uses only 80% of its allocated resources each month, leaving a balance of 20GB of disk space and 300GB of bandwidth unused each month. The remaining amount is enough for the hosting provider to add four more clients to their server to create more profits at no additional cost.

The problems with overselling

When over-selling methods are used, there is only one winner, the hosting provider. They are essentially making instant profit for every customer they earn above what they can handle, while the customer is receiving suboptimal service. What many providers fail to realize is this: when a server is running at full capacity, processing power, memory usage, and maximum throughput are affected.

A server can be built to host 500 websites and transfer 5000GB of bandwidth, but when put into practice that's not always the case. Servers running extremely crowded forums or websites that contain a lot of content, databases or scripts using code that requires resources, every other website on that server can face reduced performance and even possible security threats as a result.
These issues usually manifest during the holiday season and peak Internet browsing hours (17pm to 00pm), overselling will cause a website to time out or increase page load speed, which it's not good for companies. For example, if you run an online retail store that sells physical products, your busiest time will be around holidays like Christmas, when people are shopping for gifts for each other. Choosing a hosting provider that practices overselling can drastically reduce your profits if your website is always timing out or if the pages don't load fast enough for your users to browse.

Private servers virtual and shared hosting

Two other hosting options available are private servers virtual and shared hosting, even if cheap have a number of problems.

Shared hosting - as the name suggests, shared hosting is when you share a server with other customers - sometimes called web hotels, customers who may require more resources at certain times of the day that affect your service. These are known as bad neighbors in the industry, and hosting your site using a shared hosting plan can affect your website in the following ways:

• Slower response times
• Influence SEO rankings (lowest rank in Google)
• Increase your website's bounce rate
• Create more security threats
• Increase timeouts (website offline)

If you run an online business using a shared hosting plan, this method puts too many things out of your scope, giving you no influence or control when neighbors hoard resources.

VPS - has the advantage over shared hosting in the fact that it doesn't share a lot of things with its neighbors, this is because it is able to separate server resources and implement limits, but still has some problems. For one, the only thing that separates one site from another is what is known as a "software wall", although offering some level of security usually won't be as secure as the separation you can find on ManagedServer. it.

Most VPS hosting providers do not implement "throttle limits" during peak periods, a customer who abuses the server with heavy demands will affect the performance of your website. “CPU Steal” is one such metric that shows how much of the CPU's processing capacity has been taken up by noisy neighbors. Finally, the disk space on a VPS is shared by all customers, if multiple users have to read and write at the same time, the disk performance can severely affect site performance and it is very problematic for databases besides opening other sites Web on the server open to possible backdoor security threats.

And we sell in overselling?

It is a very important question to ask and a must when deciding which hosting provider to use. ManagedServer.it does not oversell and our hosting structure is designed to maximize the customer experience. Our server processing power, memory usage as well as network capacity and disk space for each client are isolated, and monitored via netdata which means it is impossible for other clients to access or monopolize your resources, resulting in the absence of negative experiences and total security.

We recognize that overselling will not only cause short-term problems for our customers, but will also have long-term implications on performance and output. Running servers at full capacity can essentially “downgrade” hardware performance over time. Sometimes to the point where it's not solvable causing huge problems for everyone else on the server. Unlike a VPS, in addition to maintaining large excess capacity, we use technologies such as DRS, which automatically moves sudden noisy clients to hardware with better capacity when needed, ensuring consistently high performance at all times.

Are you tired of hosts that are unable to guarantee satisfactory performance and stability for your websites? Do you need high-performance hosting that doesn't oversell? Then you have come to the correct place!

Our hosting is designed to offer maximum performance and stability, without the risk of resource overload or downtime from overselling. We ensure our customers have enough disk space, bandwidth, and resources to meet their needs, without forcing them to share resources with other customers.

Furthermore, our team of experts is always available to provide you with assistance and support, and we will be happy to advise you on choosing the most suitable hosting package for your needs. It doesn't matter if you are a small or large company, our high-performance hosting is the ideal choice for those who want to ensure maximum performance and stability for their websites.