Web Design and Development

Overselling vs. Overloading: What Is Overselling? (Part 1)

the Frequently Asked Questions…
  • What is overselling?
  • What does overselling mean for reseller hosting?
  • Is overselling bad? Should I avoid it?
  • What is the difference between overselling, over-allocating, and overloading?
  • Is overselling a VPS okay?
  • Which hosts don’t oversell?


and The Digital FAQ Answers…

Of all the terms that exist in the web hosting industry, “overselling” is easily one of the most confusing ones around. In fact, even most hosts and server experts fail to under what it truly means. The term overselling carries all kinds of negative connotations, and overlaps into other areas. It implies that a host is engaging in nefarious activities, providing slow servers, putting as many customer as possible on a server, etc. But none of that is necessarily true. Overselling doesn’t mean any of that.

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What Is Overselling?

Quite simply put, overselling is a poor way to describe resource management on servers.

It essentially only applies to disk space. Technically, it applies to bandwidth, but in reality there’s so much bandwidth available these days, that it doesn’t matter outside of DDoS mitigation.

So let’s take shared hosting (aka reseller hosting) as an example. There’s four concepts to keep in mind:

  1. Customers are purchasing a plan that has X amount of space.
  2. Customers are actually using X amount of space.
  3. Servers have X amount of space.
  4. Servers are routinely upgraded to new technology, which generally has more space.

So you have to manage the server based on this key factor: Does the customer use the entire allocation of space? In almost all cases, the answer is no. The average website is under 1GB, and gets only modest traffic at best. To reserve X amount of space forever would be a waste, not to mention that it would significantly drive up costs. And therein lies the reason for overselling: to keep costs down for the customer.

To borrow some math from Stablehost — an excellent host, that is very transparent and honest — a single server might contain 1200GB. Their $10 plan gives 20GB, and allows for 60 accounts per server that is not oversold (1200/20=60). The server would bring in $600 (10 x $60), which is barely going to cover the costs of the server itself, if even that. While a home desktop is cheap, remember a server with RAID-10 SAS server-grade hard drives, multi-core Xeon CPUs, and 64GB+ of RAM is not. There’s also energy costs to run them 24/7, facility costs (co-location), personnel costs for support, bandwidth, etc. So that $10 needs to be like $30 or $40 to cover its costs!

In addition to that, the server would only use a tiny portion of CPU and RAM, which is a complete waste of resources. You’d be paying a high price for something you don’t use.

Suddenly overselling doesn’t sound like a bad thing, does it?

Which Hosts Oversell?

All hosts oversell, period. A shared/reseller host that says otherwise is either lying, or charging an amount commensurate to having such a service. (i.e. about $4 per GB)

Unfortunately for customers, almost all hosts hide this information. They often refer to it as “trade secrets” or similar nonsense. It’s most often hidden because it’s gone beyond mere overselling and entered the realm of overloading.

If you’re a reseller host, it simply means you can do this with your reseller account. A simple tick/check box in cPanel allows the reseller to also offer more than is available in their account. For example, a 20GB reseller with 20 x 2GB plans (40GB = overselling). The downside to this is the host is now one level removed as the provider, and too much overselling by the reseller may affect CPU and RAM on the server! It takes a really, really good host to provide reliable reseller hosting, because of this fact.

How Does Overselling Work?

The key to “overselling” — or better yet (again!) smart resource management, which is what this really is — is to create a balance between server resources, including RAM and CPU, available disk space, and average customer needs. You want to be able keep your promises to the customer, while keeping costs in check.

Again, Stablehost has proven itself to be an honest host, and has shared those numbers with us! For them, the magic number is 50%, and a responsible level of overselling is:

  • No more than 600 customers (on average, it varies) per server. That’s about 2GB each, on a server with 1200GB. It’s more than double the average.
  • At least 50% CPU is idle, which allow for decent resources for all sites.
  • At least 50% of RAM available, which again allows for sites to use it as needed. This includes MySQL queries.

If at any point a site causes these numbers to drop, Stablehost will move that site to another server. (Unless it’s just grown so large that it requires a VPS, but that’s another story for another time.)

It’s all about assessing your hardware, assessing your typical customer, and making intelligent decisions based on this data.

Sadly, a lot of hosts don’t do this — especially the “unlimited” hosts like like Dreamhost, Godaddy, and the various EIG brands (iPage, Fatcow, PowWeb, etc). What happens there is you end up with a server that is not just oversold, but overloaded. It runs slow, gets suspended for using “too many resources”, and is overall frustrating to use. In part two, we’ll examine What Is Overloading?, and which hosts are the typical offenders.

Have questions or comments? Post it in the forum, and we’ll be happy to answer you there.

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