Overselling

From NixTheWorld

Overselling is the act of selling the services of a production machine to users in order to maximize profits. [Overselling]] typically refers to CPU-time, RAM, and disk space.

For example, a typical shared server may have dual-Xeon 2.4GHz processors with 8GB of RAM and a RAID array consisting of 1TB of disk space. This machine, if sold to as a dedicated server may house some 50-60 domains with all services-associated. This machine, when sold as a shared server for resellers may house some 500+ users, each of which have been promised some 200GB of disk space and nothing more than an equal share of CPU-time and RAM.

Overselling relies on the fact that clients purchase services based on palpable, calculable, statistics. A client seeing these statistics rarely is informed enough to ask how many domains are hosted on the same server, how much traffic is seen in/out of the server, as well as how much physical disk space is even available (read: free) on the server.

Clients like to know that they have been promised 200GB of space, and few are aware that by the time they have a website, &c that is close to reaching that amount of disk space, they will most likely be getting so much traffic that they will be forced to move off of the shared server due to taking up too much resources. Likewise, most sites that reach that type of size are hosting files that some hosting companies may consider contraband, such as .mp3, .ogg, .avi, .rar &c even if the files are legitimate, as such extensions are often associated with piracy.