What is overselling?
Overselling is a term used in the web hosting industry to describe a situation in which a company provides hosting plans that are unsustainable if every one of its customers uses the full extent of services advertised. The term usually refers to the web space and bandwidth transfer allowance.

How can competitors offer so much for so little?
This is done by overselling the physical means of their hardware. It is not uncommon to find webhosts offering accounts with as much as 700GB of space for as little as $5 per month. They count on the end user (you) only using a fraction of what is provided. This leaves the ability for them to resell the remaining space to another customer, and so on.

Don't I get what I pay for?
No, not really. They may offer a plan with 700GB of space, but these hosts will have clauses buried in their TOS that prohibit certain file types such as zip archives and media files. By simply uploading HTML pages and images, you will never come anywhere close to using the full capacity. In fact, most desktop computers do not even have hard drive space totaling 700GB.

So are their servers capable of what they offer?
No, absolutely not. A typical oversold server may easily have 200 accounts on it, each allocated 700GB. If each client uses 100% of their capacity, that is 140 terabytes! Typical webservers have a quarter of a terabyte or less! So in this case, they are expecting you will use about 1/560 of your allocated space, or in other words, roughly 1.25GB a piece!

What about hosts who offer "unlimited" resources?
We get asked this a lot. There is NO such thing as unlimited! There is ALWAYS a limitation to hard disk space! They may offer you unlimited space, but it's actually unmetered, meaning they don't keep track of what is used. The problem is this: What if everybody uploaded beyond the server's physical storage limitations? Once again, they count on you only uploading miniscule amounts of data. We've found that when other hosts offer "unlimited" space or bandwidth, they often have "fair-use" clauses in their terms of service that prevent excessive use of hard disk space or transfer bandwidth. Resource hungry websites are often suspended or deleted without notice.

How do you assign your resources?
We have a client to server ratio as well as an absolute resource allocation system. We NEVER have more client allocated space than what our servers physically have available. And our servers will NEVER have more than 80% of its hard drive space or bandwidth resources allocated. Period! This ensures that if (for some unforeseen reason) every person on the server uses 100% of their account, there will still be ample hard disk space remaining.