overselling on reseller service

It's never good that anyone oversells anything - datacenter, host, reseller, client - overselling something usually leads to disaster at some point down the road.
 
It depends really on how they've planned their infrastructure. Well planned infrastructure can handle overselling, where the company can realistically move customers between servers without any downtime and sometimes with the customer not even knowing they've been moved (Obviously they'd need to be notified).

Overselling has it's good and bad points.
 
It doesn't seem like a good idea. Any company that encourages overselling is most likely not established and desperate for business, therefore does not have the infrastructure to handle the overselling. It could be exactly the opposite, but it does not sound like a good business plan to me.
 
No, Overselling isn't good. As Handsonhosting stated overselling of any product in the hosting industry and even dealing with phone data plans for example. Overselling = Overcrowding and then leads to carrying capacity then failure in software.
 
Overselling has been the turning point of telecommunications. Where one had to have his dedicated set of wires to connect to the phone company central, now they share them.

As soon as you shared, you oversell, as there's always a scenario where the number of users is higher than the capacity. But when in order to eliminate the 0.01% of time when this may be a problem costs would rise by a similar factor or more, "dedicated" or "not oversold" is no longer a feasible option, except for a few lucky people or companies. Networks are always oversold, otherwise they would lie there mostly unused.

I have no problem with allowing a reseller to oversell. After all, shared hosting (and thus reseller hosting) is oversold by its very nature: you get momentary access to all or a big chunk of the the server's spare computing power, and so does every other customer. If you all try to go heavy on the server at the same time, things will break, or slow to a crawl. This doesn't happen the vast majority of the time, so it's a great deal. The alternative is 50+ times more expensive: a dedicated server.

The much touted, flexible, pay-for-what-you-use "cloud" is just another form of "sharing", and thus of overselling. If tomorrow every single customer would try to upgrade and use 10 times more "cloud" than they currently do, the cloud would break.
 
Overselling is really bad. It might slow up your clients website and who knows the node itself host about 1000+ domains.
 
Overselling is really bad. It might slow up your clients website and who knows the node itself host about 1000+ domains.

Say if the technical support monitored the server ensured it had reasonably good response times, all services working fine a webserver such as litespeed was installed and all customers that took up excessive resources were moved onto another server. AND if the company that owned the dedicated server were willing to pay for the extra resources as required e.g. harddrives and bandwidth. Name me a reason why overselling is bad?
 
i dont think overselling is bad as long as its managed correctly and the servers are monitored by a real person.
i installed litespeed on my servers which helps and my clients noticed the difference once this was installed. as PK states if you notice a client being resource heavy, just pick them up and move them to another server. i recently moved a client off my main client server as they were starting to request more space and b/w on a regular basis and their site was starting to effect the IO etc. in all the site was that big it took a total of 77 hrs to backup and restore on another server as it kept timing out during the restore
 
It would honestly depend on if their plan would support the overselling, but that would mainly be for the provider.

On reselling, you would have to look at the fact, if they allow for overselling on their packages, then that means you have multiple people overselling and as well most likely the provider of the services as well.

If the provider has a 100GB hard drive, and has 5 resellers quoted for 10GB of the hard drive space, nothing stops them from using 20GB and then the hard drive is filled up. Then your customers get hit with an error saying "hard drive full".

A lot of companies do this, and a lot have failed because of this. If the provider has the space demand to support overselling and has no problems adding in more space or transferring to new servers in real time, it wouldn't be a problem. It really depends on if the provider can manage all of this.

I would recommend asking them, how much free space/bandwidth is left on his server and what would happen if the hard drive filled up.
 
Once my servers HDD reach 70% i will stop adding anymore clients/sites to the server, so that this gives any current clients room to ask for a bit extra space if they need any and also stops the server being oversold and lagging.

also if a client wants to make a backup the space is needed to allow them to do this as say a client has a 5GB site and wants to make a backup then cpanel will duplicate the full site ( so needs 5GB space) and then compress the duplicated site to a tar.gz file. if you dont have the extra 5GB then a backup will not be able to be made.
 
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There is a big difference in overselling and a server being oversold.

Everyone agrees that anything oversold is bad, but that really doesn't have anything to do with overselling.

Like it was mentioned earlier phone companies and all don't just sell to just the amount of people there lines will hold.

Your house as well I am certain that if you added up all the total amount of circuits you would find the would exceed the total amperage of your breaker panel.
 
There is a big difference in overselling and a server being oversold.

Everyone agrees that anything oversold is bad, but that really doesn't have anything to do with overselling.

well if your server is not oversold like i leave mine with 30% free then how can you be overselling as their is still plenty free resources available

Like it was mentioned earlier phone companies and all don't just sell to just the amount of people there lines will hold.

Most utility companies will do this as it will be very rare that everyone of their cusomers will be using all resources at the same time.

Your house as well I am certain that if you added up all the total amount of circuits you would find the would exceed the total amperage of your breaker panel.

Every house will be the same as how many households will turn on all lights, place an appliance in every socket and turn them all on at the very same time. if they did this then the trip switch would trip and cut the power
 
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I learned about that from my father whom has been an electrician for many decades now.

He taught me about figuring loads and such. Really came in handy when I went to college and studied computers and we covered basic electricity.

The point of allowing overselling is so that the user can create packages that they wish to offer, so they have more freedom in creating their packages. It is not an invitation to run a crummy server management scheme which most people think. It just gives the reseller more control over their setup and resources.

If you search way way back you will find me making much the same statements about how rotten overselling is.
Once I moved from just hosting and started getting heavy into reseller hosting I got the full scope of the situation from end to end.
 
Is it good when a reseller host allows overselling on their service?

I donot think that it is good to have a reseller hosting with having overselling allowed as i believe the day you join the web host it will be probably a new server thus performance will be good however day by day due to overselling allowed other resellers / users will have more and more domains added will start making your web hosting services slower and more slower..in name of performance, thus i will always recommend to choose a good web host which do have strict no overselling policies. :crash:
 
i believe the day you join the web host it will be probably a new server

where do you get this from, do you think if you get a reseller account with a host they will give you a clean new server, well think again.

A reseller account will most likely be placed on a VPS along with other resellers, some hosts will allow overselling, but this is not recommended.

Yes if a host has a new VPS to place resellers on, then you could be the first on theat server,s o oversellign will not be an issue, but as soon as others are placed on the server then overselling will be an issue
 
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