There is a host I am not going to name which has ~30 servers and 50,000+ customers.
Isn´t that quite a large customer base for the number of servers? They also have an unmetered plan. The normal plan is pretty generous at 200gig storage 2,5 TB transfer. I guess if someone actually uses this they´ll be shut down. Or if they even use close to 1TB they will probably bust the CPU.
Is it common for VPS's to be oversold? I'm currently torn between paying a little bit extra for a dedicated, giving me the piece of mind that I'm the only one on the server, and getting a cheaper VPS.
I'm looking for a VPS/dedi for a new project I'm working on that requires a quite specific set up that isn't feasible with shared hosting. The problem is that I don't think I need the full power of dedicated server.
Can you recommend a company that's been in the business for a while and isn't likely to go away? One that provides what it promises?
I'm looking to spend no more that $40 a month on an unmanaged service. I need at most 300GB of transfer a month and 10GB of space is plently (all I really need is the OS install plus a GB or two).
i have a question about overselling, if i offer 999999gb's of diskspace for $1/mo, you say i am overselling, and its a bad thing, right? well does that mean medialayer oversells because they can't truly offer unlimited mysql databases, can they? eventually, just creating databases thousands of times will consume diskspace?
View 14 Replies View RelatedJust how it actually works? I have a pretty good knowledge about Xen and Linux KVM (somewhat about VMware as well). Prior to joining WHT, I rarely heard about Virtuozzo and OpenVZ.
I'm just interested in RAM usage actually. I also read on some threads that you can oversell storage and net bandwidth as well? That just seems a little weird to me.
I also used a fairly good amount of Solaris Zones as well.
Example, if I have a 8GB box and I leave some, say 512MB, reserved for CT0. 8192-512=7680 (I know the ACTUAL RAM amount will NOT be 8192), that leaves 7680MB use for CTs. So technically in OpenVZ if you dice out dedicated 512MB VEs... you end up with 15 right?
So you are able to sell more than 15 VPSs on a 8GB server box? If also set all burstable RAM to 1GB for all VEs.
In Xen, when you set dedicated RAM it is taken away from dom0, period. That's all there is to it, no oversell (Xen 3.3+ you can use ballooning to overcommit RAM, I know).
Within CT in VZ, user is able to check beancounters to see the guaranteed/burstable RAM. Technically you can't lie to the users.
I researched around... when oversell in VZ and the RAM gets maxed out... VZ will try to slow/stop/kill processes in order to keep the guests happy, to me that's just dangerous. Why needs to kill processes for RAM saturation?
Anyone can shed some lights for me? Or point me to an article(s). It can be technical, I should be able to grasp.
I had a quick question regarding bandwidth. I am currently with a provider that supposedly offers 10,000 GB of monthly transfer and my monthly fee is $229/month (core2quad server).
I wanted to know how can they possibly offer that much bandwidth for that monthly fee? Is that normal?
This is about a sustained 30 MBPS usage throughout the month to make it 10,000 GB at the end of the month.
Are you telling me they will let me use 30 MBPS of bandwidth sustained for that monthly fee?
Bandwidth costs has come down but they have multiple providers and even if they do have huge bandwidth contracts, the cost has to be around $5 - $6 a MBPS per month for them. That is excluding the other providers and all other network costs.
so JUST for me, it means they will pay about $180 a month just to cover my bandwidth expenses, then there is electricity, server costs etc...
Is this overselling? If I approach this limit, do you think they will find a reason to kick me out?
The funny thing about this "yet another" overselling thread is that my host, Siteground.com, is an active over seller, and even though I don't like it, this is now way of life.
The hosting industry has changed in the past few years. In the quest for success, for more clients and more profits, the larger hosting companies have made sure the hosting world has changed, and has changed for the worse (both for customers and companies).
Why did it happened?
Back in 2004/5 hosts used to offer moderate packages containing 1GB of space (a lot) with some traffic. Then, came ego powered web hosts such as Bluehost, came with the answer of the ever important question - "How can we drive more signups our way?" - the answer as simple, genius, and yet destructive - recruit affiliates! Affiliates want money, and money were being offered, a lot of them (65USD per sale I think).
Every miracle lasts for three days - what happened next:
hint: type "web hosting" in google and check out the directories on the top positions
So, people started copying the idea, and recruiting affiliates, and the web hosting directories were born. Now everybody is in the directory, and the highest bidder was on the Number one position, the BEST HOST!, well, the one who pays most...when you are first, there is always someone who is willing to pay more, so the first company outbid the N1 host, then the second outbid the first, so quickly afiliate prices jumped from the 50-70 range a few years ago to the 150-200 bucks per new client today.
That is crazy, you are paying affiliates 2-3 years worth of revenue, just to have the client. But what does this have to do with OVERSELLING? Everything!
Now that you are in the directory, and can't pay more (you will never make any money...), you have to be different than the other companies in the directory. How - invest in new technology? better customer service? money? oops, they were spend already by the marketing department. So, the only thing that you can do is to raize features.
The first company raized the features to 20GB space/200GB Traffic, then the next one came with 50/500, then somebody else came with 300/3000, then companies like ours came and said, ok, if you can offer 300GB of space, sure we can offer 600GB of space And then yahoo came, and did it - "we promise you the world" - unlimited space, unlimited traffic - what a rubbish - there is no such thing as unlimited, unmettered maybe, unlimited - just ask them about their bandwidth cap - they have one, don't they?
If you google the directories on "web hosting" you will note that everybody offers unlimited space/traffic. But how can you be now different now? - of course, invest in technology...oops, no money, sorry. Then again someone came up with the idea to offer to host more domains per one account - and now we are different! Here you can host 5 domains, elsewhere, only one, everybody will signup from us! Aleluia! oops, three days later, everybody was offering unlimited domains, and nothing changed the equilibrium.
You though it was all over, wrong! Then came Sept 2008 around, and the Bluehost ego struck again - what can we do to attract more customers - sure, lets dump the prices - 7.95/mo was now 4.95/mo, surely no one can else can charge 4.95/mo, give unlimited features, domains, and pay 200 bucks per new client. Of course this is true, at least for the first 3 days, then everybody lowered their prices.
The end result: everybody has the same equal share of the market, and everybody is making a lot less profit (if any) than before. On the other side, the customer is now used to shop for the biggest features at the lowest price, without really knowing how to understand difference between a quality service and an affiliate "you pay a lot and don't get anything in return" hosting service.
I've seen in previous threads people to immediately jump and start saying that overselling is bad - that is true and yet not true - it depends whether you are a host or a customer:
Customers:
+ cheaper than before, much cheaper than what it should be
+ features, if you need to use more features, you have a deal
+ competition will drive quality/innovation forward
- 90%+ of all overselling hosts spend their money on advertising, and you get no service at all
I would never buy a hosting from a company that relies exclusively on affiliate marketing - they don't focus on quality, they can't offer reliability (no money for new servers, no money for softwares etc), and the worst off all, they educate the customer with bad habits and of course, drive them away from the hosting business. Up to now, this was not a problem, as even though many people opt out of building and managing personal websites, newcomers compensated. However, recent stats show that the growth of the US hosting users has grown with less than 0.4% over the last 12 months, and with the economic slowdown, more people are opting out each month.
Overselling by itself is not a problem - it is true that most customers would never hit the limits (even though most of the time they are invisible) - hosting overselling is just like any other industry overselling (phone, electricity, airlines etc). There is only one BUT here - even though it is unlikely that most people would consume a large share of resources - can you provide service to those customers who would actually need the features? - I think the answer is yes at least this is true if you are a large host with a lot of infrastructure.
Of course, what will happen if everybody start using all the resources. What will happen if the Chinese stop eating rise and start consuming meat?
Their pro D is 200GB for $55
Compare to others its alot. But they better not be overselling reseller accounts. Specially with overselling enabled it will be impossible to live up to it if they are overselling.
I'm willing to pay a bit more for a host that oversells to a lesser degree. I used "IP Neighbors" to find out how many sites were on a couple shared-server hosts.
I currently have two websites on different hosts. One shows 71 urls on the same IP. The other shows 670! The one that shows 71 is quite a bit more expensive, but I'm wondering if all servers hold similar amounts or if the number is not that relevant. I'm also guessing that since some websites are huge and get lots of hits, while others do not, simply looking at numbers may not be much help.
Can anyone give a good guideline on how to judge this? Simply looking at reveiws doesn't seem to be of much help. I find that the webhost having 670 urls on a server getting praise for fast loading, while I find it much slower than what I'd like. Lots of reviews are coming from people without a perspective on the possibilities. It's fairly easy to judge webhosts on service. There are plenty of relevant comments on this. Judging the network and the degree of overselling has been much more difficult for me.
The concept of unlimited disk space is something that I am not able to understand, and would appreciate if anyone could help me understanding it.
I see many giant hosting companies offer unlimited disk space with their shared plans.
But if you actually try to upload that much data, they will ask you to not use your account for file storage. What does that mean? I am really not sure..
Say if I have a movie website which has many movie files large in size. My website offers those files for download or streaming. Does that mean the disk space for my files will be considered as to be used for file storage?
Just not able to get the entire concept. If you cannot store files, then how can someone use unlimited disk space?
I have a Linux-2 512MB VPS with TekTonic and when I was ona 256MB UM1 plan I would experience daily frequent slow-downs that would last around 1 or 2 minutes, just enough for my software server to timeout and disconnect users. It wouldn't be downtime, it just would take 2 minutes for the SSH login message to appear and the website and lag was unbearable.
I was in the process of looking for a better VPS when they started to offer their new Metered plans at a new place with new servers, I switched to test it out and I no longer had the slow-downs for about a month.
Starting around end May, I would begin to experience the same type of slow-downs. As days continued the slow-downs kept getting worse and worse. Eventually around mid June after 5 support tickets of my problems, they finally admitted that "The host was swapping" and they said they would double RAM for the Node.
After a few days things did begin to die down for about 10 days, and then things started happening again, gradually more and more slowly. I have submitted about 5 tickets from June to now, their common response is that "It's working fine now" which is true, because the slow-downs only last about a minute or two, and I can never get to support in time for them to investigate. Just yesterday they admitted "The host was swapping" and they said they would double the RAM, sound familiar?
Can anyone explain to me what might be the problem?
Is it common for VPS providers to need to double the RAM every month or 2? or are they overselling of resources?
Is it common for a VPS to get slow-downs like this a few times a day? If so, Its seeming clear to me that because of my sensitive software that restarts itself after a 30 second timeout or slowdown, I should look into more dedicated options rather than VPS.
just want to share some negative experience with bluehost, thoughts on overselling, and to ask for an advice on what hosting to move to ... Bluehost.
Here's what is going on on the server box that I have an account on. I can see this via the ssh account that bluehost gave me.
The box is 8 CPUs, with average load about 15-25%, though sometimes it goes up to 70. It's got about 700G of space for the users. There are 26 registered users (including myself), but these are only those who have asked for ssh access; since I guess not everybody asks, there just as well may be another 100 or so users.
Now, bluehost offers 1.5TB (or is it 15TB?) storage. Since we've got 0.7TB for at least 26 of us, the conclusion is obvious: nobody can get the promised amount.
Now this is where the problem begins. Apparently one of the users of the box has attempted to make good of the 1.5TB promise; as a result the box ran out of space.
The consequences you can imagine.
The consequences for all of the users of the box - not only for the one who made it run out of space. I was actually using only a couple of gigs, and when the box went full my accounts started loosing emails, my cpanel was shut down and so on.
To add up to the trouble, bluehost didn't react until I (and perhaps others) complained. And when the support did pay attention to the problem, it was only to add some 20-30G (may be they just cleaned up something, I can't say).
Overselling.
Now it becomes clear to me that overselling is a problem not only for those who try to actually use the promised amount of space and bandwidth, but to everybody. Moreover, if a single
user tries to use all his space it already leads to troubles.
I was imagining before that these providers have huge servers, so that if one actually uses his 1.5TB others won't notice - it's only if many try to do this there's a problem. How very naive. Indeed it's hard to imagine a single server box on which somebody using 1.5TB could pass unnoticed. As it happens with bluehost, a server can't accommodate even one such user.
Finally, I'm in need of recommendations.
I'm looking for a hosting to move to. In fact I only have a couple of static websites with about 20 emails on them. However, it appears to be not such an easy task to find a reasonable host. The point is that I like to have at least 2-3G of space- so that I wouldn't need to delete any emails and worry about the space in general. What is on offer, however, is either 200M for smth like 7$/month, or these unlimited TB from oversellers. Somehow there seem to be nothing in between. Thus what I need is perhaps a moderate overseller. One who can't allow everybody to use all their space at the same time, but can tolerate reasonably expectable increases of usage.
In short: is there a hosting provider that can give me: 3G space, 2 domains allowed to host, ~3G bandwidth a month, 30 or so emails. And all this for 5-8$?
I recently got a VPS from VPSLand before reading all the negative reviews... Everything seems to work fine EXCEPT disk operations. Sometimes it seems writing big files to disk, or moving/copying files around on the server will completely lock it up.
I opened up PerfMon and with my IIS/mySQL services stopped (which means my system is running absolutely nothing), the disk queue and disk % values are ridiculous.
See:
www|europeinruins|com/temp/disk-noiis-nomysql.JPG (can't post URL's so switch the | with .
I am owner of a web hosting company with a plan with overselling and I see plenty of criticism lately for resources that we offer.
In the country where we work, offer such a plan has allowed us to grow our business and invest in infrastructure that other web hosting companies can not afford. We have a large number of servers (Dell 2950, Xeon Octo Core, +8GB, Large RAID 10, ISCSI remote backups) and a network increasingly large/quick.
In addition we have highly qualified technical staff and technical support 24/7.
All this (managed correctly) allows us to accommodate all types of customers even if they have a relatively high use of resources. In conclusion, our customers are generally very satisfied.
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I knew all about overselling until I saw this one.
WOW. I mean just WOW. I'm speechless. Please, everyone, dont fall for this kind of scam.
Let me know the list of Web Hosting companies that offer a lot for low price and oversell.
View 7 Replies View RelatedCan someone recommend a good overseller? I have 300GB+ in home videos I want to back up online somewhere. My plan is to just leave a crappy computer of mine uploading non-stop for like a week or whatever.
All I really need is a place that oversells but won't give me crap for actually using the space I pay for, and fast upload speeds would be nice too. Oh, and cheap is definitely good and I don't like it when hosts put up advertisements on my error pages. Nothing else really matters to me that much.
Out of curiosity, anyone have some stats or more information regarding the 1and1 shared hosting backend? (raid setup, how they "load balance" users across servers, ...)
They seem to use boxes with 4GB of rams, quad 1.6ghz intel processor (xeon 5110), 3.2TB of hdd (90% full). Looking at the /home/ it seem to host more than 10k accounts!
find a none overselling hosting company
unlimited?No!I don't need the "unlimited".
like the bluehost,dreamhost etc.
I'm just looking for a normal hosting company...
budget is under $10/month.
I'm interested in creating a small website exposing the biggest overselling companies, and how their overselling practices are false marketing.
Simply put, I want to benchmark each host with exact tests for accuracy. Any idea how I can fairly test each host, e.g. benchmark?
After the tests have been performed, I will explain which are the worst hosts (e.g. the first to give me the boot due to some TOS clause, e.g. cpu usage), etc.
Also, would anyone like to help out with this project? I'll be putting some nice marketing into it.
We like to enable "Overselling Allowed" setting to our resellers, so we tested with creating test reseller account.
Here is what we did
Domain.com(main domain of “reseller”) with reseller user name "reseller" and set resource limit under this reseller account, 4000MB diskspace and 607MB bandwidth with "Overselling Allowed" checked. And assigned 3000MB diskspace and 30GB bandwidth to domain.com
And downloaded dummy files from this domain.com and it went over 700MB bandwidth and waited until bandwidth statistic is updated... and now..
even it's over 607MB bandwidth, this account/domain is still able to load...it suppose to show "bandwidth exceed" page, right? And it worked when we tested cpanel(individual) account.
Also after exceed the bandwidth when we tried to create account under this reseller account by login as "reseller", it still allow us to create account even "Create a New Account" page shows that bandwidth is exceed....