Over selling hosting?

[ardit217]

When I started to "shop" around for hosting i was looking for the most space and bandwidth for the best price.

But, people started to say that those places oversell their hosting and you will never really be able to use it cause its not really there.
Most of them recommended that i use their hosting, which gave like 3 gigs of storage and 6 gigs of bandwidth.


Is this true?

 

[Robster78]

I'm pretty sure a lot of companies oversell their hosting, on the basis that most of their customers will only use a fraction of what they have been allocated.

Having said that, even if your host is operating in this way you should expect to get the storage and data transfer allowance you've paid for, they just may not be able to cope if a large percentage of their customers start using their full allowance.

Generally what I would watch out for his hosts who sell "unlimited" hosting, as they will probably have an acceptible use policy which means that at any time they could tell you you are using too much bandwidth. Its much better to have set limits with pre-defined overage fees so you know exactly what you are getting for your money.

Perhaps you can post some examples of companies you've looked at, other members may have experience of them.

Hope this helps

 

[DanielEZPZ]

It is true.

Its done to make them look more attractive to potential customers. If you knew nothing about overselling and saw two packages for the same price, but one offered 1GB and the other offered 1000GB, which would you go for?

Most overselling hosts have a definition in their terms and conditions that limits you from uploading certain files, i.e mp3s, videos and backups are disallowed.

"Unlimited" space hard drives do not exist... So nobody can really offer you unlimited space for £5 per month..

 

[ardit217]

thanks guys,

ImHosted.com: Website Hosting, Web Hosting, Ecommerce Web Hosting, Affordable Web Hosting, JSP Web Hosting - is one that people say over sell.
They have won awards an all but people still refuse to believe they are legitimate.
They sell 2,500 gigs of storage and 20,000 gigs of bandwidth for only $6.95.

Host Monster - Web hosting - Is another one.
They have 1,500 gigs of space and 15,000 gigs of bandwidth at $5.95

But then you have companies like http://www.travsolutions.com/ who sell 1 gig storage and 50 gigs bandwidth for $5.00

Is it cause they are just trying to resell hosting.

Lastly i think that the large companies can sell sooo much at such a little price cause they have large amounts of customers and can afford the servers

 

[DanielEZPZ]

No matter how big the company is, they wont let you use 2,500GB...

For starters, that'd be a whole server + a NAS unit per client.
Purchase cost would be around £5,000 and running costs (power + bandwidth) more than £50 per month.. So they're not going to let anyone use that for £5 a month..

Travsolutions seems to be just a GoDaddy reseller, so would be another to avoid.

 

[ardit217]

well how bout godaddy.com? i use them now.

 

[DanielEZPZ]

I've never used them so I can't really comment. However they're definitely not going out of business anytime soon.

I've read a few reviews from people saying they have had a few problems with godaddy and now only use them for domain registration.

 

[ardit217]

you guys think i should e-mail them with lots of yes or no questions?

 

[DanielEZPZ]

What good would that do?

 

[ardit217]

Im gonna ask them question like can i use all xxxxx gigs? it's a yes or no question.
And they have to answer it, no?

 

[DanielEZPZ]

They do, and their answer would be yes.

However, they'd cancel your account before you reach anywhere near that limit. Probably for "CPU Usage" which they probably don't have defined in their terms.

Besides, from their terms...

HostGator reserves the right to cancel the account at any time with or without notice.

So if they think you're using too much resources, they'll just cancel you.

Another thing I hate about Hostgator is that they don't do any sort of backups... We backup all of our servers every hour.

 

[ardit217]

lol, i back up my sites daily.

But can't any company do that?
Close your account that is.

 

[DanielEZPZ]

Yeah they can. Some do it more often than others though.

i.e the biggest account that my company offers comes with 30GB of webspace. We have clients using their full quota and have no objection to them doing so.
We priced our packages based on the resources we offer and stick to them. On the flipside we have heard of Hostgator, Dreamhost etc, closing accounts due to resource usage.. without warning!

IMO offering 350GB of drivespace and 3,000GB of bandwidth every month for $4.95 is crazy.