Web Hosting: What is Overselling?

When you’re reading about hosting on forums and blogs, you’ll come across the term overselling.

In this article, we’ll look at what it is and why it props up a large chunk of the low-cost hosting market.

What is Overselling?

Overselling is the practice of selling more hosting resources than you have available. The idea is that customers rarely use their entire resource allowance, so you can safely promise them a little more than you actually have.

This could be a good or bad thing, depending on your point of view.

Without it, cheap and ‘unlimited’ shared hosting wouldn’t exist. But overselling could also impact on your site if a host tries to stretch server resources further than they can realistically reach.

Overselling isn’t necessarily unique to web hosting. It’s similar to a mobile phone contract that offers many thousands of free SMS messages in a month: the network knows it can offer these vast allowances since hardly anyone will ever come close to using them.

Exceptions to the Overselling Rule

On VPS and dedicated server accounts, you’d rarely come across overselling. That’s why they cost more.

Customers on these plans pay for what they actually have available; there are no fuzzy limits.

Should You Avoid Overselling?

Some people see overselling as a ‘dirty secret’ in hosting. That’s a little melodramatic. Hosts are simply making the best use of their resources in order to bring prices down.

There are rare situations where overselling could spell trouble, though, and if your host is inexperienced, you might be impacted by that.

But if your site uptime is critical, you’re almost always better off with a VPS or dedicated server anyway.