Oh man my small VPS is getting raped by these traffic spikes. I need to upgrade or use caching plugins. Well I’ll figure something out. Okay so I was wondering the other day, how overselling started. Like how overselling grew and finally stopped at the unlimited space/bandwidth plans. I did some research and got the answers.

It looks like overselling started back in 2005. I couldn’t find out which company started it though. But, it did look like BlueHost started it all (damn you BlueHost!). Again this is might not be right. We’ll never know who came up with this “brilliant idea”.

2005

A few hosts (ex: BlueHost, PowWeb) are overselling the bandwidth, only. They’re overselling upto 100GB of bandwidth. Still not bad. Just trying to beat the competition (by lying a bit).

2006 (early)

Hosts aren’t happy. They want to oversell the bandwidth a bit more. On average its around 100GB to 300GB bandwidth. A few hosts (ex: BlueHost) are offering upto 15GB space though.

2006 (mid-late)

This is where it gets better. I mean for those greedy hosts. Bad for us, of course. Hosts such as PowWeb are offering upto 20GB of space and 400GB of bandwidth. PowWeb’s probably saying in your face, BlueHost! Oh wait. BlueHost is offering 50GB of space and 999GB of bandwidth.

Woah. Holy shit! DreamHost is offering 1TB of bandwidth. There we go. We’ve found our leader in bandwidth overselling.

2007

Okay here’s where we get our 100% oversold plans (aka the “modern overselling”). DreamHost is offering 200GB of space and 2TB of bandwidth (and so is HostGator). What are they thinking? We’re not complete idiots. Enough overselling!

Oh no. Its not enough. BlueHost wants to kick the competition’s ass by offering 300GB space and 3TB of bandwidth.

2008 (early)

Yay 2008! Everything’s pretty much the same as 2007 right now. Everyone is offering 300GB space and 3TB bandwidth. Now lets fast forward a few months. Hosts are offering 1500GB space and 15TB bandwidth. Which greedy bastard came up with this? I think it was PowWeb. There are no archives of 2008 on the Wayback Machine yet. But, I remember PowWeb offering it first.

A few hosts are offering unlimited space and bandwidth too (oh crap!).

2008 (mid)

This is where things get totally screwed. Now most of the oversellers (PowWeb, BlueHost, etc) are switching over to the unlimited plans. This is where we’re at, right now.

Who started it all?

Well to me it looks like BlueHost and PowWeb were the masterminds behind this. But, hey I didn’t go around checking every single host. I only checked the leading oversellers.

Over to you

I hope you guys learnt a bit on how overselling grew. This isn’t very accurate, but still, you get the idea. Well go ahead and drop a comment on what you think about overselling and if you have any idea where overselling really started from.

Don’t forget to subscribe via RSS or email, if you’ve enjoyed this. And lastly, I would like to say “thank you” to the hosts that completely destroyed changed the hosting industry with the idea of overselling.

Man I wanted to make a list of oversellers. But, you know what? It’s just not worth the effort because all the hosts are overselling. Instead I should make a list of hosts who are NOT overselling. I just hate it. The hosting industry is just getting totally messed up.

Some hosts are proud of the fact that they oversell. They admit it on their company blog (like HostGator) or site. And they give us a bullshit reason on why they oversell. They say something like how can you expect us to give you 15,000GB dedicated space and bandwidth for just under $10/month, servers cost a lot and we know that no one is going to use all the space. Well that really pisses me off!

Well why the fuck do you need to oversell in the first place? I know its because of competition. But, do they really think that all of us are so dumb that we’ll fall for their “unlimited” space and bandwidth plans.

For example, when I order a pizza I expect to get the whole pizza (not just a few slices). I don’t care how much I payed for it. I don’t care if I only paid $15 for a large pizza. The company set the price and they better give me my whole pizza. I don’t want the pizza guy to come with a few slices and tell me that they knew I wouldn’t eat the whole pizza so they took off a few slices.

Like don’t lie to us. We don’t need 15,000GB of space. A dedicated 10GB is good enough. If you can’t really give us 15,000GB of dedicated space then don’t offer that. Hosts should be honest. Offer us what they can afford to. We’ll choose a transparent host over a lying overseller, any day of the week.

I don’t know who came up with the idea of overselling. Hosting isn’t buffet! At least in buffet they have all the food for us. In the hosting world, they don’t even have that.