Web Hosting: Could Your Website Be Affected By Oversellers?

Lately I’ve got an email from Charles, a blogger who owns Nierva.com. He apparently got his web hosting account suspended and was asking for advice. Here’s the email he sent me:

Hi there.

I’m Charles of Nierva.com. I just want to ask an advise regarding webhosting plans.I have just bought a webhost plan at webhostingpad.com. I still consider my self a newbie at webhosting. With just 5 blogs hosted at them, and with some basic plugins installed, my account was suspended yesterday. The tech support said that one of my blogs is eating up 15% CPU resources which they have a limit of only 10% of the server cpu resources. They said that maybe the Wordpress stats plugin is the culprit why my cpu usage is high. I have read about their TOS but there’s no mention about 10%.

Is this how cheap web hosts works? too bad I’m in for them for a year. tsk tsk.

Do you have any idea what Wordpress plugin I will watched or that caused the high cpu usage? What web hosts that offer high cpu usage when talking about blogs and that’s affordable and not that expensive?

I hope you get my point.

Thanks. Hoping for your reply.

Thank,.
Charles

So what exactly is overselling? In the web hosting industry, overselling means that a web host sells more resources than they actually have. They oversell storage space, bandwidth, databases, etc. Have you happen to see one of these shared hosting plan where they offer you 1500GB of storage and 15,000GB of bandwidth for like $4.95 a month? Well guess what? A 1500GB hard drive wouldn’t even pay for itself if you stayed with the hosting company for a year. The thing is that the hosting company knows that their average customer will not use more than a certain amount of the allocated resources.

So why do web hosts oversell? Well that is simple: competition and money. They know that less experienced customers will be impressed by these features and many of them will fall for the cheapest host with the most features. Web hosting is such a competitive market that most companies have to oversell to stay alive. And also, the more customers they host per server, the more money they make.

Is overselling such a bad thing? Short answer: it depends. The problem arise when the web servers just can’t keep up to the task. As long as web host keeps a reasonable resource overhead, overselling will not be a problem. However there are many providers that will totally overload their servers.

What do I have to look out for then? Read the fine prints. This is your providers TOS (Terms Of Service). Even though they’re offering you the sky, they often put a cap on other resources. For example, their might be a limit on the percentage of CPU or memory usage your website is using. They can also limit the number of concurrent database connections. That can be a huge problem when your website starts getting a lot of hits. I’ve also seen limits on the file size you can store. You also have to be aware of the consequences if you break these limits. Some providers will completely close your account while some may suspend it temporarily. I’ve seen some providers refusing to refund customers who had paid for a whole year after shutting down their account. Search the web, you’ll find many horror stories on the subject.

Are there any alternatives? I say that if your website is getting more traffic and uses more resources than a shared account can use, it’s because your website is not just a personnal site anymore. It pretty much grown into a business site, right? And there are affordable alternatives to shared hosting but not as cheap.

A Virtual Private Server (or VPS) is a good alternative. It offers the flexibility of a dedicated server but at a fraction of the price. It might need more knowledge to operate a server so if you’re unexperienced, you may want to get a managed VPS (starting at about $25 / mo.), where the company’s support team will take care of your web server. There is also co-location and business hosting. They are pretty much the same thing as shared hosting although the number of users per server is very limited, therefore allocating more resources to each of them.

So next time you shop for a web host, don’t forget to read their TOS and contact their sales departement. Don’t hesitate to ask them questions about what limits they have and what happens if you break them. You might also consider to upgrade to a better type of hosting like co-location, business hosting or a virtual private server.

And remember the old saying: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is!

Bookmark It