Originally Posted by Salathe You base your entire argument around an idea that the web hosting sphere is somehow fixed, solid and unchangeable (or so it reads). So, a host offers 1000 clients space on a server assuming that they'll all happily co-exist and use far less resources than advertised. Most of them will. Some of the clients will strike it lucky and have popular websites that use up more resources than their "fair share" but less than they were advertised.

I don't have an "argument" here at all, and I fail to see where people are getting this from. I wrote an article explaining what overselling is, why it is generally speaking a very bad thing, and how it can affect people. The responses from others appear to be "overselling is fine, it's what everyone does, it's not a bad thing" - completely neglecting to take into consideration most of the points I raise.

Yes, hosts can oversell happily providing (as you say) their clients use "far less resources than advertised". And that's exactly the point. If I pay for a package, I expect to be able to use it. If somebody purchases hosting expecting to be able to use massively high traffic and bandwidth, they deserve to know that in the vast majority of cases they can't. Just because they say you can, doesn't mean you actually can - and therein was the purpose of the article.

Now the host can take two paths; boot off the resource hogger (with a made up excuse about breaking the AUP) and still have 999 happy customers, or make allotment for the customer and give them what they paid for (or at least what they need) by perhaps migrating them to another server. Some hosts will take the easy, first option. These are the oversellers that you want to avoid. Some hosts will take the also fairly easy second option, and these are the oversellers that there's no reason to avoid. It strikes me that overselling in and of itself isn't a bad thing. It's what the individual hosting provider does with regards to people using more than the "average" resources that really matters. Hold on a minute, lets back track. Overselling in and of itself isn't a bad thing.

Overselling *is* a bad thing, and you practically admit that and then contradict yourself by backtracking and saying that it's not a bad thing if the host choose the higher path and move you to another server. Make your mind up here, you can't have it both ways.

The fact remains if they didn't oversell in the first place, they wouldn't need to move your account to a different server. You can still generate a profit in the hosting industry without overselling, regardless of what anyone may say. I've seen it done many times.

From what I can see (which isn't a lot, stupid myopia) the entire argument boils down to don't go with a bad host, in it's simplest form. I fail to see your intended point that all overselling is bad.

Again, no argument here, merely education. If you couldn't see using basic mathematics how overselling is bad, then I cannot help you

Interestingly, but completely off topic, I get only 75,000 results for "dreamhost sucks" in Google [cf, Jules' 137,000]. I also get 894,000 results for "google sucks". D'oh guess it's time to stop using the latter's services.

Well that's no surprise considering Google retrieves different results depending on your country of origin. Don't expect them all to match

Even thinking you can make the comparison between "dreamhost sucks" and "google sucks" is completely illogical. They're vastly different.