Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 123 LastLast
Results 16 to 30 of 39

Thread: Overselling

  1. #16
    Member
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Location
    Northern Finland
    Posts
    86
    I tend to agree with ayksolutions on this one.
    There is nothing wrong in overselling to a certain degree, but you have to know when to draw the line or it will undermine your servers and your customers.

    You will find that just about nobody will come close to using all their alotted webspace and bandwidth, so that's a bit of a waste. People generally tend to get hosting plans which are actually way too large for their needs. I think most customers overestimate what they actually need.

    There will of course always be exceptions, which is why you always need to keep a close eye on things and make sure none of your systems get overloaded.
    IceBlueHost | Premium Quality Hosting Solutions
    Shared | Reseller | VPS | Dedicated | cPanel | Softaculous | Master Reseller
    True 24x7 Support | No Overselling | Servers in US, UK and Germany
    Follow us on Twitter for the latest news and special promotions

  2. #17
    1PlanHost
    Guest
    Let me first say that overselling has caused the demise of many a hosting company. I have been in this industry for nearly 10 years (yes I am the old guy) and have seen this happen far too often to mention.

    In this intense competative industry everyone tries to up their competitors with more features and more bandwidth, more space, more email accounts, unlimited this or that for lower and lower prices. It really gets seriously ridiculous and leads to the harm of our industry overall. HostingCon 2005 on Chicago had several sessions on this very subject and all of them lead to this same conclusion.

    So many hosting consumers have been burned by overselling, poor performance, reliability issues as well as poor customer support that they have become highly suspicious of trusting any hosting company. We get new customers every single week that start off talking with us on the defensive being downright hateful toward our staff without any justification other than they just came from a "bad host" that oversold their servers. We train our support staff to deal with this and reduce the barriers but it still takes a long time to develop trusting relationships.

    It is totally understandable why hosting companies oversell. It is called profit seeking plain and simple. Those that sacrifice quality performance, security and reliability to achieve profitability are in for an uphill battle.

    Best Wishes for a .Net Success!

  3. #18
    1PlanHost
    Guest
    I just read my rant about overselling and realized I didn't answer the original question. Sorry about that, the topic is a serious pet peave of mine due to it's negative effects on our industry.

    The answer is BOTH are responsible but the wholesale host is in my opinion the real source of the problem. The reseller needs to monitor his or her resources and not create unrealistic hosting plans that lead to overselling. The wholesale hosts on the other hand need to do the same thing!

    We at 1PlanHost often get complaints from potential resellers who are evaluating our plans. They are used to unlimited domain and unlimited resources from other reseller hosts. They are litterally shocked when they see on our resellers site that we actually limit the number of domains and each and every resource in order to protect the security, reliability and performance of the servers.

    You can certainly find cheaper plans that sell unlimited domains, unlimited email accounts, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited server space but at what cost to reliability, security and performance? Ask yourself these questions,

    1. How important is your business reputation?
    2. How do these unlimited plan companies pay their bills?
    3. How long will your unlimited plan company be in business?
    4. Is the company ran by a teenager in his spare time from one server out of their basement (or a cheap rented server) or a complete staff of certified professionals with numerous servers and a data center?
    5. How many domains do they allow on each server? Unlimited domains on a server has proven to seriously affect reliability, security and performance.
    6. Are reliability, integrity and professionalism important to your success as a business with your customers?
    7. Does your reseller program place all new domains on one single server until it starts to show performance problems and then set up another server to oversell? (This is the most common method in the industry). Or do they distribute all new accounts over multiple servers evenly and cap the number of domains to less than 500 per server?

    Best Wishes for a .Net Success!

  4. #19
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2004
    Posts
    391
    Overselling is a normal business practice, used in many online and offline businesses. It is responsibility of the company offering the service to live up to its promises, nothing more.

  5. #20
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Posts
    2
    I agree that there is nothing wrong with over selling. I believe that everyone has over sold at one time. When Hosting companies run specials to draw new clients thats considered over selling but they only over sell for a limited time. So nothing is wrong with wanting to attract new clients by over selling to show the new clients what kind of hosting company you have. As long as you dont cut your throat by offering something that is unreal.

  6. #21
    Junior Member ayksolutions's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Location
    Albany, NY
    Posts
    19
    We provide many unlimited features, without any give in security, reliability or service. We are also able to monitor our resources and make changes accordingly.
    AYKsolutions.com
    Hosting & Web Design
    Professional. Painless. Polite.
    Visit our Forum & FAQ .

  7. #22
    1PlanHost
    Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by ayksolutions
    Its like buying a boat that is supposed to fit 20 people. Instead of 20 you get 35 and charge them $5 a piece. You make a decent profit out of the 15 extras. Now, as long as the boat doesn't sink and it does not hinder its performance, there is nothing wrong with it.
    Remember the Titanic? It was a Big fine boat that was supposed to be unsinkable so surely packing a few extra passengers in the lower decks for extra profits was harmless right? We in the hosting industry can learn from that history lesson that overconfidence combined with lack of preparations, foresight and emergency planning can be fatal.

    If one thinks their servers are running fine now with all the overselling, just endure a few years and those "little sites" that were not using much resources in the beginning have all of a sudden grown large bandwidth eating space monsters. Before you know it, you have major trouble. It happens way too often and yes those boats do start taking on water eventually.

    I would encourage those who are serious about developing a long lasting hosting business to define their models carefully with growth of the hosted sites in mind. A quick profit today may lead to disaster tommorrow so keep your eye out for iceburgs!

    Best Wishes for a .Net Success!

  8. #23
    Member peter phillips's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
    Posts
    35
    IMO most of the overselling hosts are usually youngsters looking to get rich quick. For them there really is no limit and there is no too much. Ultimately it comes down to what a customer thinks is ridiculous or too much.

    As long as a host can get away with it without running into too much hassle, they will continue to push the line a little further until one day the line can be pushed no further. As long as consumers remain uneducated about the industry, they leave themselves open to be taken advantage of.

    By driving down the prices and increasing the number of customers per box, these hosts are actually driving themselves out of business. Low prices will result in poor service and ultimately a bad experience for the customer.
    Outsourced Hosting Support || Server Management || Web Development
    Phone : 408-512-1759 || AIM : support24by7 || MSN : sales@eTechSupport.net
    24x7 Dedicated Web Hosting Support

  9. #24
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2004
    Posts
    391
    Quote Originally Posted by ayksolutions
    We provide many unlimited features, without any give in security, reliability or service. We are also able to monitor our resources and make changes accordingly.
    Just curious, how can you make profit offering $10 per year hosting plans?

  10. #25
    Member
    Join Date
    Dec 2005
    Location
    Istanbul / Turkey
    Posts
    34
    Some overselling web hosts increase cpu power, server bandwidth and avoid unpleasant effects of over population. Thus, it depends on the company's ability to deal with problems and keeping their customers happy with holding their service quality in a steady state.
    www.HostMarker.com - Web Hosting Directory
    Search and Browse Categorized Web Hosts
    Request Free Hosting Price Quotes

  11. #26
    Junior Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Posts
    5
    I see this is an older post but it seems to be slowly active and I'm in the mood to get some typing out of my system.

    I think that reselling, if done properly by giving attention to the actual bandwidth and diskspace at regular intervals, is possible. I can, with our company, resell. We haven't reached the point where we'd consider it and the only reason I would even consider it would be simplicity and profit's sake. The ONLY reason that I'd consider is my current provider has easy methods in place for me to upgrade in a reasonable time-frame so that when it reached a 70% full (assuming I'd oversold that'd be a good place to start as opposed to waiting for it to be 90% full if I'd not oversold) I'd upgrade to an additional drive.

    In my search for a hosting company - it was long and painful but mostly for the poor support techs i harrassed for weeks/months on end - that was one of the many things I checked. One of the biggest concerns was the ease (and price) of being able to upgrade at any time. The choice has been made, sort of...

    At this point - we don't say either way but I'll share with you - we have absoloutely no plans nor need to oversell. However, if we do make the choice to change that we'll then upgrade to additional disk, bandwidth, RAM, etc as need be when the margin hits a set 70%. In other words, should the resources be at, say, 70% of the alloted disk space being used we'll upgrade by adding another drive. At the opposite end, should we not oversell, when resources hit 90% - in case we should get a sudden influx of clients - we'll upgrade then.

    Anyhow, that's just my view. I spent a lot of time researching (and between myself and the three other people involved) have probably been online and hosting for a lot of years. (We're all kind of old I guess. I'm the youngest at 32.)

    Figured I'd join, post a little, see if it was going to be really active in here again at some point.

    KGIII
    WhatHostingShould.BE - We are what hosting should be.

  12. #27
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Sep 2008
    Posts
    1
    i agree with peter.. that reseller would be responsible for that..

  13. #28
    Guest Moderator ~ServerPoint~'s Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Posts
    1,846
    Are you sure that it is good idea to bumb 3 year old thread to say that you are agree?
    ServerPoint.com - a true hosting company offering online presence solutions since 1998
    Web Hosting, colocation, dedicated servers, Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting
    Wholly owned multi homed network, servers and facilities

  14. #29
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Sep 2006
    Posts
    323
    It is better to use service from the first hand, not from resellers... Choose the company which owns the equpment and network!

  15. #30
    Junior Member
    Join Date
    Mar 2012
    Posts
    14
    I would have the same opinion with Phillips on this too. It means that the host was not capable to forecast the right quantity of reserves his/her customers would use.

Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 123 LastLast

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •  

  Find Web Hosting      
  Shared Web Hosting UNIX & Linux Web Hosting Windows Web Hosting Adult Web Hosting
  ASP ASP.NET Web Hosting Reseller Web Hosting VPS Web Hosting Managed Web Hosting
  Cloud Web Hosting Dedicated Server E-commerce Web Hosting Cheap Web Hosting


Premium Partners:


Visit forums.thewebhostbiz.com: to discuss the web hosting business, buy and sell websites and domain names, and discuss current web hosting tools and software.