How do you feel about overselling of webhosting?

I think many providers do oversells, i dont really mind if they scale up when needed.

I've worked for webhosting companies and honestly, it's in your best interest, as well as theirs for them to upsell. If you start getting a little extra traffic that you aren't expecting, you've got yourself a nice little cushion. Or perhaps you decide to upgrade your site and add a whole bunch of extra content, you don't have to wait for their support personnel to upgrade your package.

Depending on what type of hosting you have, you should only be paying an extra couple bucks per month, as long as their only upselling by one package. On the other side of the coin, if you've got a good webhosting company they should be staffed 24x7 and upgrade you within a matter of a few minutes, hours at the most.

Yea, it seems as if most of those companies that do upsell seem like they upsell so much they know that people won't reach it or they don't want them to so they set a limit like on files or CPU so that if you over use you automatically get suspended. So basically you won't get near what the plan says as in the fine terms it says about all that.

I think the upsell business is getting so bad that people will buy hosting just because it says they get 200 gigs of space and 1 tb of bandwith.

are we talking about overselling (selling more space on their server than what they actually have) or upselling(talking customers into buying upgrades or higher tier packages)?

overselling makes sense in the same way it does with the hotel industry, their room rates can stay cheaper if they are full more often, so, if on occasion they fill up and some of their customers have to be moved to another hotel, then thats fine, and that doesnt usually happen very often

upselling is a normal business practice used in all sales environments, i, personally, am not a big fan, but hey, people gotta make money somehow

Sorry over selling, I think I got the 2 terms mixed up.

I just think some businesses go over drastic and don't think about their clients but more about the money they want to make so they make clients but at the same time end up losing some of them.

Overselling,

I do web hosting, and I'll tell you flat out, of course we oversell, no it was not our original intent. But when you've sold 100 people a package thats 1GB Space/100GB Bandwidth, and you realize only 40GB on your disk is being used... you realize that overselling doesn't hurt. Only problem is, if I had a 400GB disk, and I loaded up ~1200 1GB accounts on it, then we'd have a problem... because there could very easily be a BIG different in HD usage from one day to the other.

In general, oversell until you still have a nice cushion (cushion depends on customers, if I sell 1GB/10GB package, I'd oversell something like 5GB expected usage for them, and hopefully 2GB cushion)

As long as you don't terminate people for actually using what they pay for, overselling is great

my 0.02

Yes, overselling is a necessary part of the hosting industry, without it we would still be paying $5/Month for 500MB space, and 5GB bandwidth.

If you buy 1GB/10GB bandwidth, are you honestly going to use the entire thing?

I know my websites normally only get up to about 250MB..... not including DB size

Just a list for you:

THE OVERSELLING KINGS (and Queens)

http://godaddy.com/
http://dreamhost.com/
http://hostgator.com/
http://1and1.co.uk/

Hmm, thats the main 4 that come to mind.

Yea, I think overselling is bad in my oppinion I made a whole argument about it awhile back but cannot seem to find it so I'll keep looking.

But I was talking to a CFO of a hosting company they said they had the same conversation about overselling with other big companies that oversell they said they rather oversell and lose customers then sell correctly and treat them correctly.