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.

Via Web Hosting Unleashed, HostGator has announced a new niche hosting service — SEO Hosting. From its hosting plan page:

Our hosting plans are designed for those who require advanced Search Engine Optimization tools. Our customers know that the key to a successful SEO campaign begins at the foundation, their web hosting provider. SEO hosting customers have come to depend on the reliable, easy to use interface that we have developed for unsurpassable Search Engine Optimization.

Here is a question for those running web hosting companies today: “Are life-time hosting plans feasible?” Do they present a valid business model? Is it possible to run life-time plans, i.e. your users pay once and once-only for a hosting plan that runs as long as either the user or the hosting company shall live.

It actually sprung out from this discussion thread at Whirlpool forums, where many Australian Internet users hang out. OP asked “any reason why I shouldn’t go with life-time hosting?” and used one small US-based hosting company as an example, where for USD$120 out-right you can get a life-time hosting plan with 6,000MB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth.

Being able to run PHP scripts and applications is probably one of the most obvious feature in shared web hosting today, but the actual process to make it fast and secure at the same time might not be that trivial.

I am actually writing this post in response to this thread at WHT, where web hosts discussed ways to fight back against those 200Gb oversold plans that are populating the shared hosting industry today. That thread went off-topic half way through when Matt Heaton of BlueHost and Kevin Martin of Pair Networks had a not-so-friendly discussion on whether to run PHP as CGI or as mod_php on servers.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net is not your typical vastly oversold shared hosting companies that give you gigabytes of space and terabytes of data transfer for $10/month. Instead of charging you a fixed monthly fee, it went the way of micro-payment — you are only paying for the resources that you are using. It is in the same spirit as Amazon S3, except you get a proper web hosting with PHP, CGI and MySQL support.

Ben at WebHostingUnleashed has written an excellent article, giving us 9 Tips For Not Getting Screwed By Your Web Host. So far I have counted myself lucky that I have not been “screwed” in any way by web hosting companies, but I have read countless bad stories on Internet and web-hosting related forums. As I have previously blogged about Lunarpages’ article on why web hosts suck, hopefully Ben’s article can help you to choose the web hosts that suck less.

“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.

Seriously. If your business depends solely on your website, and you are expecting lots of visitors when sales are on — don’t host it on a shared host. Especially ones that are obviously overselling.

GoDaddy.com, the domain registrar company that brought us cheap domains back in earlier part of this century, has recently doubled the storage space and data transfer of its already insanely oversold shared hosting plans. For example, 100Gb storage and 1,000Gb data transfer just costs you $6.99/month, or cheaper if you sign up longer terms.

An interesting article written by Isabel Wang, The Future of Dedicated Servers, where she discussed whether the rise of Google and Microsoft Live and their abundant resources might make the dedicated server market obsolete, when people are switched to on-demand hosting.