What is overselling?

Judging from how people use this word, I don't think there is a clear consensus.

• Some people are using it for "extreme overselling", but without clear notion of what constitutes the "extreme" overselling.

  Most of them practice "mild to moderate" overselling, most probably.

  I would call it "extreme" overselling when the host sells A LOT more than the usage predicted by statistics (or any other means of valid prediction), for example.

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• For some, the term "overselling" applies only to the bandwidth and disk space, somehow.

  I don't think they can clearly explain why it's applicable to only these two kinds of resources.

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• For many others, if any one of resources is sold with the limit that may cause the shortage of the resource when everyone fully uses it, it's overselling.

  So, if TOS says the CPU % limit of 10%, the host is overselling.

  Or TOS or the contract says "2% of server resources" and they have more than 50 account per server, it's overselling.

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And maybe there are some people with other definition of overselling, most probably.

If we really want to discuss about something, it must be clearly defined in the way matching to the general perception of public (if applicable) and agreed by all folks participating in the talk.

Without this kind of agreement, the discussion and/or statement around "overselling" is doomed to be futile.

Why some people love to talk "overselling", then?

• First, there are many hosts who use this term to bash their competitors.

  You can see this very often in a forum like WebHostingTalk.

  This is a practice pretty similar to saying "You are a f****** SOB" type of thing.

  It does express their negative emotional reactions towards some competitor(s).

  Not much more.

In other words, unless the person using the term is supplying clear reasoning to back his claim, it's a yet another way to say "I hate it/him/her".

These people seem to have peculiar tendencies.

1. They tend to act mechanically/robotic/repeatedly.
2. They tend to act together.

So, these people may look like a flock of parrots.

In fact, I think the use of "overselling" by these people are somewhat similar to the cries of alarm made by animals. A warning calls to their peers.

They are hoping that it would scare away potential clients from their competitors.

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• Then, there are some users who got brainwashed by these hosts.

  These people may think that we can measure the reliability, performance, and whatever of a given host by simply declaring if the host is "overselling" or not.

  It's absurd, but some people buy these, somehow.

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• Here is my theory about how this started:

I guess some people want to see things in a very simplified manner.

Some people are extremely simple in their mental structure that when they see the result of bad management, lack of technical knowledges, and other short comings, their short circuited brain directly link them all to the term "over selling".

It's almost mechanical and there isn't much thinking involved.

And they are glad that they could link the situation to a term, which might be an achievement to an infant but it can be done by parrots or robots.

Some hosts are like that, and some users are infected by this, as well.

Probably, it's a convenient form of accusing others, just like any brainless name calling.

Only it sounds somewhat more technical (for themselves and people who doesn't know), and I guess they like it.

Probably, it started out when someone has pointed out that extreme over selling is a bad practice in the business, just like extreme over booking.

But some simple minded people focused only on "over selling" part and dropped the keyword "extreme".

So, some people are now brainwashed to think that ANY form of over selling is bad, while (originally) people were talking about "extreme" over selling.

This is how I see it, now.

We have limited resources and lots of things are "over sold" in a way.

Electricity, water, gas, .... most of resources (if not all) are limited, naturally.

If everyone started to use a car, a Microwave oven, or even a computer, we would run out of resources.

Also, over selling, over booking is a normal practice in many many industry.

Air lines sell more tickets than the seats they have, for example, based on statistics or the instinct of managers.

Sometime, more people show up and Air line will offer compensations for volunteers who can take other flights/routing.

And most of us do accept that way of doing business because it allows air lines to offer lower fares.

So, I don't mind over selling in hosting.

I don't plan to use up to the limit, anyway, as I always choose a package with lots of safety margin.

Is it true that ....?

• Is is true that overselling is bad?

  It depends on "overselling" of what and the extent and if it's bad/good for what.

  A simple generic bracket statement like "overselling is bad" is rather silly and not very meaningful.

• Is it true that overselling will badly affect the performances?

  Again, it depends on the details of the "over selling".

• Is overselling unethical?

  If so, ALL airlines, hotels, and many many businesses are unethical.

  A simplistic generic statement without certain contexts or conditions doesn't mean much.

  It's more of a disguised sensitives than logical statement, most probably.

Problem of people over focusing on "overselling"

• Although extreme overselling can cause lots of problem, decent/mild/controlled overselling doesn't necessarily mean that users will suffer. But many of people demonize "overselling" would insist things like: any kind of overselling will inevitably cause problems.

• Overselling or not, a shared hosting server can go down, suddenly, sometime with a single user/script using up a resource.

  Hostgator case: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=4284391&postcount=22

Asmallorange case: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=4284473&postcount=29

Utropicmedia case: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=569975

• It's evident for me that there are many other factors more important than "overselling".
  1. What kind of people are running the place?
     • Do they have a good attitude?
     • Are they competent?
     • Are they lucky?
     • Are they honest?

       ...

     • Are they nice and open?

       I put this at the last, because I would rather deal with a jerk who knows what he is doing than a very nice but unfortunate and incompetent host.

  2. What kind of server setup are they using?
     • Are they using Redundant setup? If so, what kind, what degree of redundancy?
     • Are they using clustered setup?
     • Are they using at least RAID storage?
  3. Which Data Center are they using?
     • Is it in the area with natural disasters like earth quakes or hurricanes?
     • Is is owned by the host?
     • What kind of network connections do they have?
  4. What are they doing for the security?
     • Are they using Grsec?
     • Are they using Suexeced CGI/PHP/fast-cgi?
     • Do they have other security measures?
     • Do they have DDOS protection?
  5. Their TOS/AUP
     • Any restrictions like: contents, scripts, usages, etc.
     • Any limits like: Daily/hourly hit limits, DB connection limits, etc.
     • Any other fishy clauses?
     • Do they sell our personal data to 3rd party?

More about "over selling"

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=563522

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=562987

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=559525

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=558015

what is the effects of overselling ? http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=572169

Another thread in tutorial section: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=573659