On Wednesday 13 May 2009 08:18 am, John R. Hogerhuis wrote: > So should the ISP just keep around unused capacity?
That depends on a lot of factors. > Perhaps folks rarely use up all their allotted space or bandwidth? But what happens when they do? > It's just like an airline, they overbook seats... that's good > business *if* the actual usage statistics make sense. It makes sense until you get there early but after the plane is full. > They can always upgrade based on actual demand. I'd get upset if I as > a customer I actually ran into the wall, but that's a different > issue. Here are some interesting articles on the subject: http://blog.readysetconnect.com/2008/06/web-host-overselling-tactics-explained-how-hosting-providers-offer-so-much-for-so-little/ http://whreviews.com/overselling-hosting.htm http://www.hostvoice.com/blog/beware-of-web-hosting-overselling http://www.canvasdreams.com/hosting/overselling.php http://www.webmaster-source.com/2007/09/23/overselling-web-hosts-little-secret/ Do we oversell? We oversell disk space but we watch total space used (we have triggers that email us when /home goes over 80% of it's maximum, so we can move sites if required; we always have at least one new machine waiting to be used). We do not promise specific bandwidth, but rather total transit used per month. We've never gone over 2% of our total 100mbps connection to the 'net; if we ever get to 40% to 50% we'd look carefully at our commitment, our connection, and our port speeds. We've never permanently shut down a site for use of "too much resources" (see the above links), but we recently had to move a site to a different server in advance of the blogger being featured on a major weekday television show. And we had to shut down a site for an hour while moving it, because we weren't notified it was being featured on a major television show. (For that site we set up a static page to let their visitors know to come back soon.) We didn't want to do that but we couldn't keep the system up; load average was going to 400 to 500. Similarly to what's caused the "slashdot" effect; we encourage our clients to tell us when they may temporarily need more space/storage than usual. In general hosting companies that give unlimited space and no TOS are probably not a good place to trust your hosting. And hosting companies that take your credit card over an insecure connection are NEVER a good place to trust your credit card information. Jeff -- Jeff Lasman, Nobaloney Internet Services P.O. Box 52200, Riverside, CA 92517 Our jplists address used on lists is for list email only voice: +1 951 643-5345, or see: "http://www.nobaloney.net/contactus.html";
