Saw this gem on someone’s signature at WebHostingTalk.com, probably the biggest discussion forums on web hosting matters — OversellingTalk.com.
Overselling: A term used by numerous WHT members as an apparent attempt to ‘bring down the big bad hosting companies’. Often used in a derogatory manner without substantiated foundation, i.e. actual previous experience with said host.
The domain was registered back in April, and currently hosted on DreamHost, one of a few web hosting companies that actually make overselling work.
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Are you saying that overselling is a made up thing?
I really don’t care if people oversell. Those people don’t really understand that we are not in a commodity business.
(ps - can you add the subscribe to comment feature?)
Gary,
I am not saying that overselling is a made up thing. Sorry I did not make any comment on that site in my blog post, although I somewhat agree with the statement made by OversellingTalk.com. Personally I do not think it is saying “overselling is fine, and no body will ever get hurt by oversold web hosting companies”. Instead, I think it is mocking the WHT community whenever the term overselling is mentioned.
As of selling the commodity. Well, for me bandwidth + disk space IS commodity. I know you get different grades of bandwidth and different types of storage solutions so that one GB here is not really the same as one GB there, however the average consumers won’t care the difference. Nor do they care whether it is 3, 4 or 5 nine’s for availability. Quite a few big hosting companies can actually oversell to the extreme yet keep majority of their customers satisfied, thanks to the law of large numbers and economy of scale.
If you are not selling the commodity, then you are offering extra services — maybe you are in a different business with a different market than those big overselling hosts then :)
I have just added subscriptions module for Drupal. You do however need a user account here for the subscriptions to work.
Your link to htttp://www.oversellingtalk.com/ has too many t’s!
Ha, thanks for the link. I registered that domain as a one-off joke.
As scotty said, my point wasn’t to say that overselling doesn’t exist or that it’s 100% okay. My point was to get underneath the skin of those WHT regulars who tend to point out that a host offers larger amounts of bandwidth and disk space and infers the host is sub-par.
Overselling happens all the time in many industries. Hotels do it (because some people cancel). Airlines do it (because some people don’t show up). ISP’s do it (because not all companies will be running at maximum bandwidth all the time). Cable modem companies do it (shared pipe).
The issue should be how hosting companies monitor and proactively respond to rising server and bandwidth utilization. For example, moving users to another host or upgrading the servers. The money is certainly there for shared hosting as it usually takes a lot of users to “oversell” a single server.
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