Host Color (hostcolor.com), a Delaware based provider, says that selling web hosting service by excessively large offers may harm customers' experience. Offers that are too good to be true actually are not.
According to the company in the past year web hosting has seen a trend of marketing which unfortunately often irrespectively exploits the most customers' lack of information on how web hosting service works. Web hosts have for a very long time promoted their service by the parameters of the packages they offering - how many megabytes you can store and how much data transfer your site may have. While for most professionals this gives a fair idea of what kind of website the service can support some web hosts rely on the fact that many people simply compare the numbers and go for the largest.
That is why now most web hosts have in a attempt to outbid each other brought their offerings to ridiculous heights. "It is not uncommon for a web hosting company to offer 20 GB of web space for a shared hosting plan priced at about $10 per month. Most of you would say that this is a great offer and the clear winner is the customer. Compared to the hosting companies that have not followed the giga trend this offer is too good to be true. Well it is not!" says Host Color's Executive Director Vesselin Drangajov.
We call companies offering the likes of 100 GB monthly bandwidth for less than $10 per month "Giga Hosts". Let's look at the way they operate.
Most of the Giga Hosts offer a service too cheap to afford mainframe systems. This means that most use entry-level server and not high-end servers sold by companies such as IBM or SUN and etc. With the advance of hard disk technology the average hard disk capability of one such machine is 400 GB. If we assume that all of this space is dedicated to storing customer content then such a server would be able to host 20 user accounts (20*20 GB) and at $10 per month would generate $200 of revenue monthly? If all this were true it would take more than a year to cover the cost of the server.
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!