Monday, April 20, 2009

Web Hosting - Overselling

Overselling is a term that is emerging recently in the web hosting industry and it essentially refers to a situation where the host is selling more disk space than what it has. For example, a situation like this arises, when a host has a 100 GB disk space but it sells 20 GB space to ten of its customers; a situation which is not just possible. As a Webmaster, you are facing this strategy, when your site's hosting company is promising to sell thousands of disk space for prices as low as less than 10 dollars. If all it's customers start using the disk space that is actually provided to them, then the web host is in for a lot of trouble. Overselling is not a fault of the host and is a marketing tactic.

The web hosting companies decide to make use of this strategy when they know that they have some underutilized disk space. They opt to take some risk and hence sell more accounts than what the server can actually afford. For example in the above situation, if the host has allotted the 100 GB disk space to 5 customers and all the customers have not used their 5 GB spaces, then its definitely worth to sell the unused space to more customers. Overselling is a common phenomenon used in many service industries today. However, If, you are able to provide the customer with the service level that you have promised, then there is no harm in following such a strategy.

But there are some simple problems that a customer has to face if his company is indulging in this practice. The server becomes slow and as a result there are frequent downtimes. You also have a low connection speed due to multiple websites running on the same server.

If you are planning to oversell, closely analyze the bandwidth and the disk space that is being utilized in all the domains in a single server and hence calculate how much room you have for overselling. It gives you a clear-cut idea of the number of accounts that you can host in an overselling scenario. As a web hosting service provider, try to expand the bandwidth of your data center in accordance with the escalation in the number of the customers of company. As a service provider, one can also renew the bandwidth contract regularly. You can also hire more people to avoid the maintenance problems. These extra technical personnel will help you in facing any customer service problems like server downtimes. The hiring policies of the web hosting company can also be changed according to the overselling strategies, i.e. more customers mean more manpower.

This strategy is really useful for the web service companies because they can make a huge amount of profit by selling the sites to the customers at low rates. But, only if they make sure that they are able to maintain the service status as promised to their customers.

Anand is a web hosting professional for Reseller Hosting visit: http://resellers-hosting.b4uindia.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Anand_Maheshwari


4 Easy Ways to Identify Quality Web Hosting

hosting provider, web hosting

I always get people asking what a web hosting is. To make it easy to understand, web hosting is a piece of storage space just like the storage space of your computer hard drive. What differ it from computer hard drive is that you can only keep website files in web hosting. Every website needs a hosting in order for the world to access it. That explains why it is so important to build a quality website.

It is not difficult at all in choosing the best hosting. It is like choosing your own clothes. It requires only your common sense and preference. However, there are a few criterion that you should take in consideration.

Hosting Control Panel
Control panel is a panel for users like you and me to manage our webhosting. It is a window-like interface for users to do all the admin work including website management, file management, email management, database management and etc. When you are getting a hosting, you have better checked what control panel the provider is using because this panel will directly affect how you are able to use your hosting. For example if vDeck control panel is used, the Install Central of vDeck has tons of free software that we can utilize of. There are some providers use in house control panels too. If you come across this kind of provider, you better take your bet carefully on them. For your information, brand like vDeck, cPanel and Plesk are famous control panel and are generally preferred by everyone.

Storage & Bandwidth
Storage and bandwidth are basically the physical items you are paying for. Storage size will define how many files you can store; while bandwidth defines how many times your files can be requested by visitors. For example, if you get 10GB storage in your hosting, you will be able to store 10,000 files with the size of 1MB, meanwhile that hosting allows only 1GB of bandwidth, that means your files can only be shown to the users for 1,000 times. If there are 1,200 visitors requested your files, the hosting will only serve the first 1,000 time and leave the remaining 200 requests unattended. You site is considered down for that 200 requests. So, check how many storage and bandwidth you are getting!

Uptime Performance
Uptime reflects the performance of a web hosting. If your hosting always goes down it will definitely hurt your website because visitors could not access your website whenever they want. Internet is meant for 24/7/365 without fail. Can you imagine when you go to Facebook and realize the site is down? You will not be able to keep in touch with your friend, you will not be able to access your favorite Texas Poker game and etc. Your site will be the same if it is down. Therefore, check how often your hosting goes down. Avoid those with uptime lesser than 95%.

Pricing
As a smart consumer pricing is of cause our concern too. Web hosting is in fact a servicing product. The price can be very subjective. Some charge high while some charge low for exactly the same features. However, nobody can really define how much it should cost. So there are some providers do over price in order to earn more profit. Well, if you think the price is compatible with the service you are getting, then you can go with them. Otherwise, look for other hosting with lower price. Generally with $6/month you can easily grab a quality hosting nowadays! Hosting providers like FatCow, Lunarpages, Bluehost are easily fit into this category.

For your information these 4 criterions do help me in identifying quality web host all this while. However sometimes there are no clear statement regarding their storage and bandwidth for example unlimited storage. In this case, you should dig into their term of service document to check what they mean by that. With that, you are very near from a good provider.

Daren S. run web hosting review website for years. He has seen and reviewed many different web hosting. Check out his reviews like Fatcow, Hostgator, Bluehost and etc at his website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Daren_S.

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