| Do web hosts oversell? Posted by: John in Hosting on Aug 08, 2008 |
What is overselling?
Simply put, overselling is when a host offers to more resources to their clients than what they physically have.
I would venture to say, all hosts oversell. Overselling for the most part is a legitimate practice. Most owners of dedicated servers who specialize in web hosting receive, say, an 80 GB hard drive and 8000 GB of transfer from their data center. Lets assume one of the packages a host offers for $5 a month is 1 GB of storage and 10 GB of transfer. Physically, the host can only handle 80 clients. However, since most clients will not use their entire alloted resources, the host can oversell the unused space. Granted, any professional web host should live up to their advertisements. Thus, when the server's physical resources dwindle, the web host will either have to purchase another server from the data center, or upgrade their current server.
For the past 18 months I have been a client of midPhase. They currently offer 750 GB of storage and 10 TB of transfer. However, since my account is fairly old, I only have 250 GB of storage. Does midPhase oversell? Will they live up to their advertisements?
Since I have access to a few web servers, my midPhase account is pretty much useless. Therefore I am going to test midPhase to see if they will actually give me 250 GB of storage.
After a day of pondering how to legally use 250 GB of storage (and not violate midPhase's ToS) I have decided to host 250 GB's of linux ISO's. I will write a follow up blog in a month and let you know if my account has been suspended.
Simply put, overselling is when a host offers to more resources to their clients than what they physically have.
I would venture to say, all hosts oversell. Overselling for the most part is a legitimate practice. Most owners of dedicated servers who specialize in web hosting receive, say, an 80 GB hard drive and 8000 GB of transfer from their data center. Lets assume one of the packages a host offers for $5 a month is 1 GB of storage and 10 GB of transfer. Physically, the host can only handle 80 clients. However, since most clients will not use their entire alloted resources, the host can oversell the unused space. Granted, any professional web host should live up to their advertisements. Thus, when the server's physical resources dwindle, the web host will either have to purchase another server from the data center, or upgrade their current server.
For the past 18 months I have been a client of midPhase. They currently offer 750 GB of storage and 10 TB of transfer. However, since my account is fairly old, I only have 250 GB of storage. Does midPhase oversell? Will they live up to their advertisements?
Since I have access to a few web servers, my midPhase account is pretty much useless. Therefore I am going to test midPhase to see if they will actually give me 250 GB of storage.
After a day of pondering how to legally use 250 GB of storage (and not violate midPhase's ToS) I have decided to host 250 GB's of linux ISO's. I will write a follow up blog in a month and let you know if my account has been suspended.
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