Overselling in The Hosting Business
Though always at the center of controversy, overselling continues to be an integral part of today’s web hosting industry. Unfortunately, this practice places the customer in a tough situation because many of them are unknowingly putting themselves at risk. Regardless of what attracted you to a hosting package, it is important that you know how to recognize overselling and what actually lies behind this common marketing ploy.
The Truth About Unlimited
The web hosting industry has become highly competitive in recent times and companies are doing whatever it takes to gain that competitive edge. One of the most effective ploys used to gain this advantage is the offering of “unlimited” or “unmetered” bandwidth. While it all sounds good on the surface and definitely better than capped amounts, you should know that these claims are simply marketing tactics employed to add appeal to a hosting package. In fact, it is impossible for unlimited bandwidth to exist since the resource itself has physical limitations. The same can be said for disk space as every server is limited to a certain capacity.
You can better understand the relationship of overselling and unlimited offerings when looking at the situation from a financial aspect. Hosting providers have to purchase bandwidth and the more they give you, the less profit they make. What allows a host to get away with overselling is the fact that most customers only use a small portion of the bandwidth that is available to them. Some have this technique down to a science, making fairly accurate predictions in regard to how much overselling they can do before upgrades need to be made. When done correctly, they can safely offer these unlimited bundles and still remain highly profitable.
The truth is, most web hosting providers oversell bandwidth, proven by the saturation of unlimited packages on the market. Fortunately, most hosts are responsible and actively monitor bandwidth usage to ensure that customers do not exceed their allotments. This is critical because one or two bandwidth heavy-traffic sites could ultimately lead to the unavailability of all other sites relying on the pipe. Why be angry at the busy website owner when it is actually the web host who as it fault?. There is a chance of exceeding bandwidth usage with a fixed packages but you can generally gauge the situation better and elude many of the problems associated with overselling.
Stay in the Know
It is hard to ignore an unlimited package that comes at the right price with great support and all the features you have been looking for. In the end, the decision is up to you. We recommend that you do your homework and seek out the company offering the most reliable service. By doing so, you can better assure your chance of getting a solution where your site stays up and running opposed to experiencing problems all the time. Just take the glamorous unlimited hosting package for what it is, and if it truly suits your needs, go for it.
