Overselling, a popular trend highly prominent in today’s web hosting industry is basically a condition where web hosting provider offers unsustainable service to its customers in order to earn to earn huge. Earlier, the term was limited to the web space and bandwidth transfer allowance, but now has been reached to the extent to the service after the selling. It is seen as a dangerous practice that has rooted its position in the market of the web hosting because of mounting competing. If explained statistically, the condition of overselling is created when a web hosting company with disk space 100GB sells host service to 10 web sites for different customers and promises 20GB disk space for each.
The concept of overselling web hosting has surely given an easy way to get more out of your servers than what is possible. It makes majority of your clients use a fraction of the resources allocated to them and this in turn, offer a lot of wasted bandwidth and space. Overselling is a gamble where a host service provider sells beyond his capability by assuming that the unused resources will cover it.
Although the concept is flawed, it is standing in the market because it benefits both the seller and the buyer to a certain extent. Hosting service provider get a lucrative chance to earn more money off each server and the client remains satisfied with the additional revenue that get transferred on by cheaper hosting packages with more features. However, it is surely not as smooth as it sounds because if every single client were to build their website up to maximum capacity; it will become impossible for the host to handle the sudden swell in demand without adding extra hard drives, buying more bandwidth, or perhaps even another server. And, surely will lead to massive downtime. However, it is still quite difficult to prove that overselling is a flawed practice. The practice of overselling can surely be a win-win situation for both the customer as well as the provider till they do not get too greedy. Moreover, as long as the hosting company screens its servers' usage accurately and controls its resources and infrastructure, ensuring the quality of the service, overselling is not harmful.
Hence, in core, overselling is not inherently bad, and the only reason valid why you should remain away from it is the inability to keep it stable and balanced. Also, identifying a host who is largely involved in overselling is difficult because they do not advertise this feature. So, if you wish to configure such overselling web hosting service providers, apply some logic. As for instance if a host is offering 200GB of space for less than $10 / month, he could be overselling. Secondly, ensure to go through all terms and conditions to point out extra and hidden charges.
