Web Hosting

Overselling is a term that is recently emerging in the web hosting industry and it essentially refers to a situation where the host is selling more disk space than what it has. For example, a situation like this arises, when a host has a 100 GB disk space but it sells 20 GB of space to that of its customers, a situation which is just not possible. As a Webmaster, you are facing this strategy, when your site's hosting company is promising to sell thousands of disk space for prices as low as less than 10 dollars. If all it's customers start using the disk space that is actually provided to them, then the web host is in for a lot of trouble. Overselling is not a fault of the host and is a marketing tactic.

The web hosting companies decide to make use of this strategy when they know that they have some underutilized disk space. They opt to take some risk and hence sell more accounts than what the server can actually afford. For example in the above situation, if the host has allotted the 100 GB disk space to 5 customers and all the customers have not used their 5 GB of spaces, then its definitely worth to sell the unused space to more customers. Overselling is a common phenomenon used in many service industries today. However, if, you are able to provide the customer with the service level that you have promised, then there is no harm in following such a strategy.

But there are some simple problems that a customer has to face if his company is indulging in this practice. The server becomes slow and as a result there are frequent downtimes. You also have a low connection speed due to multiple websites running on the same server.

If you are planning to oversell, closely analyze the bandwidth and the disk space that is being utilized in all the domains in a single server and hence calculate how much room you have for overselling. It gives you a clear-cut idea of the number of accounts that you can host in an overselling scenario. As a web hosting service provider, try to expand the bandwidth of your data center in accordance with the escalation in the number of customers of the company. As a service provider, they can also renew the contract bandwidth regularly. You can also hire more people to avoid the maintenance problems. These extra technical personnel will help you in facing any customer service problems like server downtimes. The hiring policies of the web hosting company can also be changed according to the overselling strategies, ie more customers mean more manpower.

This strategy is really useful for the web service companies because they can make a huge amount of profit by selling the sites to the customers at low rates. But, only if they make sure that they are able to maintain the status of the service as promised to their customers.SEO Services ||Internet Marketing||