Overselling Hidden Resources

Hidden overselling picks up where I left off on the Overselling web Host article, where overselling of bandwidth of hard drive space and bandwidth occurred. However, more important that is the overselling of “hidden resources.” These hidden resources can be oversold without the overselling of hard drive space or bandwidth. These hidden resources are mainly the CPU and RAM. No matter how much hard drive space and bandwidth a company has and even if they don’t oversell, if the CPU can’t keep up with the amount of processing power needed to serve all customers, the overall quality of service is going to be horrid.

Furthermore, since CPU usage cannot really be measured in numbers, the best thing a web hosting company can do is monitor the overall strain on a CPU and say there are 100 websites that share a CPU. With 100 website technically each website can use up to 1% of the total CPU processing power. However, CPUs become highly unstable at high percentage usage, therefore, about .5% is a more accurate gauge per website. However, the problem arises when website don’t use .5% but use 5%. Although according to what the customer paid, they should only be using .5%, the web hosting company will not shut down the website, but continue to let the user use 5% of the CPU. And if the average customer uses more than .5% of the CPU this shows the overselling of the “hidden resources;” delivering unsatisfactory results i.e. slow/laggy servers.

Thus, the overselling of hidden recourses often occurs first when overselling and can be the most lethal. However, many companies have shown that overselling of resources can be done correctly utilizing multiple core CPUs as an alternative of lack of processing power. The main point is that there is no real standard to giving customers their own slice of processing power or RAM, but efforts are being made to make overselling of hidden resources not as deadly as can be.