"Giga Hosts" offer a service they actually do not want you to use. Their terms of service often use the following methods to prevent the situations that described above:
Daily transfer limit - Although you are given say 300 GB if your site transfer goes over 10 GB on two consecutive days your account is shown the door. Simple statistics show that almost no site would be able to use more than 150 GB of web space at most. This is because web traffic is spread irregularly with peaks on working days or major events for the site.
Hits per second limit - there is a limit on the number of visitors per second that your site can utilize. Again if it goes above it it will be shut down.
Database connection rate limits - All but the simplest websites use a database to store their content. Most hosts severely limit the number of database connections per second that your site can have. This means that if you have a dynamic website it will be probably shut down if it gets popular.
Database size limit - Although you can have 20 GB of storage the size of your database is limited to a 100 mb or so. Again this is done simply because hosting servers cannot utilize accounts that big.
File size limit - this is a centuries (oh well years actually) old method that hosts use to limit the extent to which you can use their service. You can have 20 GB of webspace but with a limit for each file to 10 MB you would actually need 2 000 files to fill it?
Using one or a combination of the above most hosts make sure that people that buy their services use a minuscule fraction of them. It is up to you to determine whether this is fair.
"We have been part of the hosting industry for 5 years now. With my comments I am in no way trying to sell Host Color's service. There are hundreds of good hosts. I however feel that customers deserve a fair deal. I feel that only informed customers can help the hosting industry to develop. When buying hosting you need to consider is that you probably do not want just megabytes of storage and transfer. I'm sure customer are looking for a quality, and feature rich service. Experienced web hosting users can tell you that technical support and customer service are crucial to a successful host." says Mr.Drangajov.
I've a reseller account at ResellerZoom, and they have overselling enabled for me. But yet I'm not overselling, I wonder what will I do when I oversell and I'm out of limit?
We at BlueGravity.com have never oversold bandwidth or hard drive space. While it may seem you are getting a better deal with some hosts that advertize a gazillion gb of space and bw for $10/mo, I dare you to use that space and see what happens.
We never over sell. Never have, never will. This keeps our servers running smoothly all the time with almost no downtime. Most of our virtual hosting servers have been up for years without any (unscheduled) downtime, and when down for scheduled things like upgrades repairs etc, its no more then 5 minutes.
If you are looking for one of the few honest hosts left check out http://www.bluegravity.com, or give us a call at 1-877-8-HOSTING. You can even ask for me, Tim, and Id be glad to talk to you.
I dont think that overselling is a problem. The problem is that web hosting providers haven't figured out a way to promote themself without playing the numbers game. I think that we will see more hosters that promote their features like Wordpress Hosting and similar. At the end of the day, nobody needs 5TB of disk space or 1 million SQL databases.
Lots of webmaster are beginning to realize that these are mostly marketing tricks and some web host are beginning to focus on more specialized support instead.
Excellent, insightful article for clients like myself who were shocked when their websites were shut down - at the conferences when they were most needed!
Your article helps me understand how this could happen, without drifting into paranoia, at all three conferences where I presented information about my conversation book. The traffic, I presume, shot up - and the host just shut me down. Of course, their action (by the mis-named Successful Hosting) cost me a large amount of credibility, sales, and money. I'm still rather pissed. I would gladly pay far more money for a reliable, consistent, and dependable host. In fact, my search for that has lead me to your website!
I wish I had read your article a year ago. Thank you for sharing this under-appreciated, and often overlooked piece of information.
The Truth About Overselling!