Web Hosts Who Oversell Resources

Overselling is a popular technique used by many hosting providers to attract customers. The only problem is that this technique is a bad thing for you as the customer.

Basically overselling is when a host offers large amounts of specific resources (such as bandwidth or space), that they could not actually provide if all hosting customers were to use those allocated resources.

The next part is where in my opinion the hosts get dirty, they actually add clauses in their terms and conductions relating to "acceptable use". There are many tricks that are put into this acceptable use policy and I will outline them in this article.

One technique that hosts use to limit you using up you allotted resources are different ratios. For example they may state that you can have no more than 10% of media (images, video, etc.) in your account, or a certain percentage of your traffic must be to non media files.

Another technique the overselling hosts use in their acceptable use clauses is to actually limit your "unlimited bandwidth". Generally they will put it down to "fair use" and state that if you use X amount of bandwidth you are slowing down the network and other peoples sites. This is simply a reason for these hosts to shut down your site and keep your money.

There is also the server resource use techniques. Hosts may hide clauses in their terms of use or fair use policies which state if you use X amount of the processor, or ram you are a burden on the network and your site may be shut down ... unless you upgrade to a higher plan.

So how do I find an overselling host you may ask? Well it can actually be quite simple, if you check off some of the following items then chances are the host is an overseller:

• Are any of the resources unlimited?
• Do they offer thousands of gigabytes of transfer or space?
• Is there an acceptable use/fair use policy (or both)?
• Do they state limits in the terms of use?

In conclusion, overselling is bad and can actually harm the good hosts out there by gaining customers through questionable means. The trick is to read the fine print, and check search engines such as Google for reviews on a specific host. You also need to remember nothing in life is free and that you get what you pay for. Meaning if your paying peanuts for unlimited bandwidth you had better be sure to read the fine print.