How can some web hosting providers offer massive amounts of web space and bandwidth for so little cost?

No web hosting provider on the face of the earth can offer unlimited web space or hundreds of gigs of space for very little cost. They are doing what is referred to in the hosting industry as Resource Overselling.

Let’s say I rented you and your wife a 2 bedroom apartment on a yearly lease. You don’t really need a 2 bedroom apartment yet, but you want to have a family soon and will hopefully need the space before the year is over. Would you let me move another person that you don’t know into the spare unused bedroom? Of course not! But that is exactly what these hosting companies are doing; reselling the resources you have already paid for.

When the web hosting industry first started most companies offered dedicated resources on their servers. For instance, if the hosting provider had a server with 20 gigs of storage space, they would only put 40 - 500meg accounts on that machine. If the server had 200 gigs of transfer allocated per month, the hosting provider would offer his 40 clients 5 gigs of transfer each. This concept worked great, every client was separated and the hosting provider made a moderate profit per server.

Then the greed set in. Hosting providers realized that some customers didn’t use all of their allocated space and bandwidth. Why put 40 clients on the server when we could put 80? How about 100? The hosting industry was transformed overnight.

How does Resource Overselling affect the end customer?

Let’s say another customer on the server has media coverage and thousands of people are flocking to their website. In a resource overselling environment their traffic could affect your website! Since the web hosting company offered the other customer unlimited bandwidth your site is now down. Imagine if this happened on a Friday night and you didn’t catch it until Monday morning when you had no orders on your ecommerce site?

Disk space overselling is another issue. If a customer decides that he wants to upload the newest movie to his web space so that he can watch it at work, your customers might start seeing disk space errors when they log into your website.

Situations like these happen every day in Resource Overselling environments because heavy bandwidth and disk space users flock to them.

Want to avoid your site going down because of another account’s bandwidth and disk space over usage? Signup for web hosting with CincyServers.com today and get the dedicated resources that you pay for!