Overselling limitations

[ldcdc]

I'm saying that if you offer burst memory, your servers should not be so overloaded as to never allow any user to utilize the burst memory.

Not sure I follow. You give each customer their guaranteed quotas, you put aside say 1GB for bursts, shared by everybody. At any point, somebody may be using it all or a part of it, but it is beyond any doubt a pitiful amount of memory to be shared by the 10 or more VPS accounts on that server. But on paper, IMHO, the host has done what it has promised, even if barely so.

The burst amount isn't guaranteed in any way, it may or it may not be available, depending on how many users need to tap into the shared pool at once.

The only real pressure to do more in terms of availability of burst memory comes from competition among providers, to which the customer might flee if word goes out that they're better.

 

[inconspicuous]

From what I have seen most providers doing shared hosting will experiment with different loads, number of accounts, disk space and eventually learn that overloaded constantly crashing servers aren't fun for anyone and your customers just run away as fast or faster than you can get them. Once the host figures out what's going on they generally wise up and back off of that overloaded limit.

I would put 300-500 shared accounts on a box at the most and feel good about it. I know that a lot of hosts might put 1000-3000 accounts on a box depending on resources and resellers.

With VPSs I think that you really have to know how much the hardware can push and be prepared to shell out for lots of ram.

The ability to oversell and get away with it is one of the reasons that hosting and telecommunications have always been profitable, I mean, why expend twice as much capital when you can just not do so and make nearly twice the money?

I think the only way you could get away with not overselling is by delivering a brand that is HIGH end and justifies higher pricing and margins.

 

[Artashes]

I'm saying that if you offer burst memory, your servers should not be so overloaded as to never allow any user to utilize the burst memory.


Advertising 1gb of burst memory while at the same time knowing that your server cannot support it for a single user is lying. It is dishonest and I would avoid any company that makes such false claims.

If you can't offer the so called burst memory than don't. Just offer guaranteed memory.

What happens if you have a server with 4 GB of RAM, you sell exactly 8 packages with 512 RAM each without any burst RAM. But all 8 clients at most only use 256 RAM worth of RAM power each, so you have 256 RAM * 8 = 2 GB of server RAM free... so you undersold the server and minimized profit margins. As long as your customers receive the best care possible, why is maximizing profit (sensibly) a bad thing? Most companies (even public) always try to maximize profits, and often that is done at the expense of consumers.

I am not sure what the reality is but I don't think most clients even use the resources allocated to them?

 

[csn-uk]

Personally when it comes to the only ethical method of offering burst able servers is that when used in Cloud computing as the whole point of this technology is to support the expansion and contraction of websites requirements. Meaning that there will be a lot of redundant performance available and it can by a provider be easily expanded.

That would be my stand point when supporting Blues argument as I am of the same impression however from a provider standpoint underselling servers to ensure that an unguaranteed resource was available is especially from the accountants view is unethical.

Though unlimited offers regardless even of cloud computing still is unethical and it has lead to the consideration of such offers as “unlimited email, database” offers that we ourselves provide, which are like any provider limited to the package size (diskspace) of the user meaning a user could have a 1GB disk space and use 1000 (1mb) email accounts however they could also use 1,048,576 email accounts at 1KB each however does a provider list 1,048,576 as the amount or 1000?

Thus what if a provider lists the email account limit at 5 on the 1GB package as the above example but instead what if I have 5x 1GB email accounts, what happens?

Is that ethical?

Possibly a different point of view however very closely related

 

[SenseiSteve]

Some analogies - Internet connectivity - Years of stats tell providers how saturated their backbone is in sold plans versus expected bandwidth usage. Airlines overbook seats based on known trends of no shows and cancellations. CLEC's resell less expensive metered lines as unmetered, knowing the odds favor them.

Let's face it - an awful lot of web hosting providers oversell their resources. Successful providers have figured out either how NOT to oversell (and still turn a profit), or oversell with minimum customer churn.