Let me brief you through a bit on the history of the web hosting industry, web hosting company run a business by leasing you a space to host your email and website with your own domain name (eg. ahbengahlian.com) and the minimum tenure would usually be one year. Web Hosting business was a lucrative and fair business game during the ".com boom" almost a decade back. During that time, most of the provider were playing the game fair and steady. What do I mean by that, they only sell on what they have to offer and the package was pretty straight forward (no hidden clause). The owner of these hosting companies would need to understand and know the system in/out to run the business. Most of the providers at the time were selling the package with the fair and reasonable amount of computer resources (50MB of disk space + 5GB monthly of bandwidth) at an average price of USD50/year.
Over the years, more and more people has ventured into the same business as it is a hidden gem in the IT industry. As these new players does not have a solid company profile to secure the business, what they usually did was lower down the price and offering more specs. This is the usual case for other businesses whereby the new player would usually sell at a lower price. This trend in web hosting businesses has been continuing until now and a lot of the providers are offering ridiculous amount of disk space or unlimited disk space and bandwidth. This is a desperate measures by business owners to secure the business and worry later on the problem that will arise. The name for this practice is "overselling", it means that the business owner is selling more than what they have to sell. Most of the Telco in my country is also practicing overselling. How do I know about this? Because I can't even send a short SMS during festive season!! It took me >3 hours to send an sms and longer to make a phone call. I believe most of you has experienced the same problem as I do. I have subscribed to a 512kb broadband line 4 years back and it is slower than a dial up connection now as they have overloaded the same segment with more users now!
By overselling, hosting providers would put more accounts that the server are able to handle. These providers are hoping there will be only small amount of users in the server will utilize their account. Therefore, the server would work fine if the prediction is right.
What if for example at a festive season, more websites on the same server receive a sudden surge of traffic due to greeting cards sending, online business getting more orders, a bloggers posted new interesting article (eg. The scandal of Tiger Woods) and etc. The server will usually be brought down to its knee together with few hundred websites on the same server at the same time. It will be unfortunate if you are being hosting on the same server. I have personally logged in to the servers of these providers and you won't be surprise that their server resources utilization is >96%.
I have a friend that fell prey for these kind of unscrupulous provider and his blog were suspended without any notice for overloading the server. We went in to check the traffic statistics and it was only receiving about 200 visits day. A switch to a more reputable at triple the price solved his problem even though his blog is receiving triple the amount of traffics.
Part 2: coming soon
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