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.

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.

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.

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?)