Yesterday afternoon when I assisted my 3 1/2 year old daughter to go to the wee, she asked some interesting questions while sitting on the toilet bowl.

Daughter: “Daddy, why don’t we have one toilet for daddy, one toilet for mummy, one toilet for baby (my other daughter who is 10 month old) and another toilet for me?!”

Brent Oxley of HostGator has recently written an article explaining their hosting plan change, which gives their $9.95/month “Baby” plan 6,000GB/month data transfer and $12.95/month “Swamp” plan unlimited monthly data transfer — they are Selling Out.

How do all us shared web hosting companies sell more disk space and bandwidth for ten bucks then the dedicated server providers sell for hundreds?

Its an easy concept really. Every web host has a terms of service with CPU and memory limits. If your website consumed too much of its share of CPU or memory then most web hosts will require you to upgrade. When you purchase a dedicated server you cant get shut down for CPU or memory abuse so they have to sell you a plan based on what your site could use with less restrictions.

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.

“Is there any non-overselling web hosting company out there?” It seems to be one of the most frequently asked questions on WebHostingTalk forums. There do exist a few typical answers. “Yes, my web host doesn’t!” “No, everyone oversells in this industry.” “Don’t buy from DreamHost/Site5/MediaTemple — they oversell like crazy!”

Overselling is indeed a very touching subject in web hosting. I previously wrote against it earlier this year when I first discovered this terminology. Then I read DreamHost and Site5’s take on this issue, and was convinced that overselling is a “business strategy”, rather than a fraud or trickery.

However, with popularity of today’s dynamic database-driven web-based applications in hosted shared servers, “overselling” is no long as simple as “having less bandwidth/disk space than the sum of all users’ allocation”. I will try to take another shot on it in this article.

Amazon Web Services is expensive, if you compare them with the overselling dedicated server market.

I have previously written about how DreamHost’s CPU minute restriction limits their otherwise generous bandwidth/storage allowance. In the June (or was it May?) issue of their news letter, they have decided to abolish this very restriction that seems to be the biggest complain about this otherwise very high quality web hosting service.

ProBlogger.net reported Idol Blogger got kicked out from shared host due to exceesive resource usage. Duncan Riley responded with his own experience with shared webhosting, which is quite an interesting read. Basically he went through several shared hosts, ranged from $6-$10/month budget hosting to $22/month Site5’s “premium account”, when his blog network grew over the last few years.