Overselling is a term that describes the sales of something that cannot be delivered. In hosting terms that means that a web hosting company has oversold the total number of space and bandwidth that they can provide. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing, for if it wasn’t for overselling the prices we would have to pay for web hosting and telecommunications would be through the roof. However, the important thing to gauge is how much the company oversells and maintains a balance of good service with a reasonable price.
To explain overselling more clearly, a set of numbers would help wouldn’t it? For example, say web hosting company XYZ has 75 GB of hard drive space and 1000 GB of bandwidth and they decided to sell packages that offered 1 GB of hard drive space and 10 GB of bandwidth per customer. Then company XYZ sells to 75 customers but sees that within the past year only 30 out of the 75 GB were being used, although all 75 GB have been bought. Then company XYZ decides to “oversell” the hard drive space that was bought but isn’t being used. However some companies are the other way around, overselling bandwidth before hard drive space.
Therefore, technically, the company could oversell and still deliver good quality service, but the problem arises when the company oversells too much and too many customers are trying to get service at the same time. For other factors such as CPU processing power, RAM speed and quality all come into play. Thus, while overselling isn’t a problem when done correctly, more and more companies are starting to oversell, hence the complaints of a server being slow or “laggy.”
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