Site5 Web Hosting Blog

Overselling: The Answer Is Not In The Box

Posted by Kevin Hazard, November 21st, 2006

In our Digg nightmare post, I may have volunteered myself to be skewered by the Web Hosting Consortium Concerned With Propagating Misunderstood Buzz Words (or WHCCWPMBW for short). That consortium may not actually exist, but the hosting industry is full of fully qualified, prospective members. As a rapidly-growing web host, Site5 negotiates great deals with our vendors. This allows us to get incredible servers for low prices, and we subsequently pass the extra dough on to our customers (for examples, visit our Specials page). An unfortunate side-effect of offering “Totally Ridiculous” deals in web hosting is the common assumption that your service to these deals will be horrible (both server-wise and support-wise): A “You get what you pay for” mentality. Site5 has been extremely successful simply because we try to provide the most hosting value per dollar in the industry.

I am sure if you opened this post with the expectation of hearing what I have to say about overselling, you are thinking that I will dance around the issue for another few paragraphs, but I just have one more bit of dancing before I get to overselling:

Now that Will The Thrill and Bugaloo Shrimp have primed the pump for me, I can explain the post title’s reference. If you don’t need me to explain where the title came from or what the next four words in the script were, you get twenty-seven bonus points and an automatic friendship with me. For the majority of the people reading this post that find my random movie references annoying and overly-obscure, I will shed light on the quote and add another “must see” movie to the growing list you started if you are an avid Site5 Weblog reader: The quote is from Antitrust:

“The answer is not in the box, it’s in the band.”

Now I am not much of a programmer (though I do find it funny that they scroll HTML in the opening credits of a programming-themed movie), so I am not sure how that programming thought fit into the nurv+ synapse contraption, but it is extremely functional in describing the common overselling misconception.

Overselling, simply, is selling more of some thing than what you have available currently (commonly in web hosting: bandwidth and disk space). I have seen people debate the practice of overselling in several web hosting forums, and often I see posts that say “overselling isn’t a problem… managing the overselling is a problem.” It’s a matter of overselling v. overcrowding/overloading. There are bottlenecks when it comes to a server’s performance, but those bottlenecks aren’t related to the bandwidth available to the box or the amount of disk space on the box.

As some other authoritative blog posts have explained, usage among customers on a single box varies dramatically. Our plan limits are based on historical usage averages and a detailed evaluation of the competitive industry landscape, and the industry has clearly proven disk space and bandwidth to be commodities to be sold in bulk. Joe Not-Overselling’s server will not necessarily perform any better than Jane Oversell-Like-Crazy’s server, and even though you feel all warm and fuzzy inside about having your own dedicated space on an essentially empty server (if our historical numbers are any indication), you are in a shared environment, and shared environments can get a little messy if people are allowed to hog the server’s resources…(As a side-note, this is the first time I have used the verb “to hog” since I was in 3rd grade and we had an ice cream party at the end of the year, and for reference, Jason did hog the Cookies ‘n’ Cream, so he brought it on himself.)

If the answer’s not in the box, then what is the band?

If the bottlenecks are not at the disk space or bandwidth levels, where are they? That’s where we cannot reveal too much information. The Site5 management team was taken to a secluded island in the Pacific to be taught the intricacies of hosting dynamics by Pei Mei’s web hosting cousin, Pei Yu. Needless to say, after carrying buckets of water up ridiculously steep stairs for no real reason whatsoever, we shall not forget what we learned in our training… We have a homegrown automated system that monitors, evaluates, and notifies us of any server activity that may jeopardize the performance of any of our boxes; we hand-pick the best hardware and software technologies to build each of our servers; we provide extensive service quality guarantees to all of our customers. What more can you ask for?

If you are snickering in the back of the class, whispering “No one else on my server” to that rhetorical question, imagine I am giving you the stern “The teacher knows it is you that was talking, but instead of calling you out on it, he/she will just burn a hole through your head with his/her eyes” glare, and I will discuss our prices (and if you weren’t snickering or whispering, you have my permission to give an upward-inflected “oooOOOHHHH” as you would do when someone got busted in elementary school).

Site5’s $5 Hosting Deal is phenomenal. It is unbelievable. It is not, however, “too good to be true.” Our pricing structure is simple:

1. We know the cost of maintaining an account of each type on our servers.
2. We don’t spend ridiculous amounts of money on advertising, which translates directly into lower prices without sacrificing any of our product’s greatness.
3. We price our plans competitively in the industry.
4. Things get cheaper, and we offer even better deals as time goes on.
5. Customers like what they see and frequently sign up.

The Bottom Line

Not much rocket science is involved in web hosting. However, in the event that we need to consult a rocket scientist on a hosting question, Matt has a dedicated line to a NASA employee with the necessary connections to get the question answered… assuming he didn’t recently neglect her for 48 hours while on a programming binge.

Site5 has a commitment to providing a quality hosting experience. Site5 gets good deals on good servers. Site5 has empirical proof to back up our current plan limits v. customer volume strategy. Site5 keeps non-hosting-related expenses to a minimum. You, the customer, get an inexpensive plan on a quality server with money-back guarantees to ensure your happiness. You should sign up with Site5.

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