Newbie Question: I don't think I quite understand how this all works

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Posted by dantheman733, 01-28-2010, 07:25 PM
Now, I know that many hosts oversell nowadays. All the big ones even offer "Unlimited" hosting. But when I was looking at reseller hosting I found that most packages have less than 100GB space (most around 10GB or so) and very little bandwidth as well. Many seem like barely enough to host one website, let alone hundreds of clients. For example, one site I visited had a package with 15GB space, 250GB bandwidth and said you could have 100 client accounts on it. So thats .15GB disk space and 2.5GB bandwidth per client. Is this correct? I know a lot of people are against overselling here, but it would seem like with such a package you would almost have to because I doubt someone would pay $5/month for .15GB disk, 2.5GB bandwidth when they cal get "unlimited" from some places for that price. Am I missing something?
Posted by Jacob Wall, 01-28-2010, 07:30 PM
It's actually hard to use 15gb of disk space unless you're hosting lots of images/videos. Think of that as a few thousand of MP3's, thousands of photos, and probably 30 videos. You can sell a lot of hosting on just 15GB. If you are expecting to make $500 per month off one reseller of 15gb disk space, you're not going to.
Posted by tcstatic, 01-28-2010, 07:38 PM
Very few sites need 100mb of space unless they have a lot of hi-res images etc. I've built tons of business sites that were not over 5mb in files including PDF's for download etc. I've built sites using a variety of scripts that have 1000's of pages and they don't use 100MB of space between files/databases. So offering the typical site a couple hundred MB in disk space is actually overkill most of the time. People like the thought of unlimited or vast amounts of storage/bandwidth at their disposal even though they will rarely use them. This is more on the consumer side than educated business users though.
Posted by dantheman733, 01-28-2010, 07:44 PM
I guess I am just used to running my image and blog hosts where I need tons of disk space. It looks like it would be more profitable to sell off the space I have left over on my servers than go with an actual reseller program. I have cpanel and whm so I am all set to sell hosting. Heck, I can throw a 1TB drive onto one of my servers for ~$15/month and put 1000 $1/month accounts on there and make $$$ (might have to upgrade my bandwidth though)
Posted by HOD-Jardin, 01-28-2010, 08:19 PM
Avoid Unlimited companies then
Posted by davet, 01-28-2010, 09:31 PM
I'd suggest charging more than $1/month to your customers. I'd at least collect $5/month from them considering the support you will have to provided them. $1/month per account is just not worth the time which will be required to support your customers. There's nothing wrong with unlimited hosts. "Unlimited" is just a marketing tactic that is used to attract customers. There are other restrictions within their TOS which would never allow you to use "unlimited" storage such as CPU limits and the types of files you can host. There are plenty of unlimited hosts that are reliable. The most successful hosting companies offer unlimited features and oversell. There is nothing wrong with overselling. There are plenty of other industries that oversell like the cell phone industry. Even some limited hosts oversell to an extent, but not like the unlimited hosts do. If you're not overselling at least a bit it's going to be very hard to compete in the hosting industry. Last edited by davet; 01-28-2010 at 09:35 PM.
Posted by SSD-Greg, 01-28-2010, 09:45 PM
Its just giving them a limit to use, When they use that limit the limit is taken from the server, a whole bunch of clients can be using 15GB of space now lets say the server space is 30GB and you have 3 clients using 15GB of space add that all up and its 45GB so there 15GB over the server limit so there over selling.
Posted by NoSupportLinuxHostin, 01-28-2010, 10:19 PM
If you really want to completely understand "unlimited", then you need to read the Terms of Service document provided by the host claiming to offer anything unlimited. The TOS will clearly outline what they provide and under what circumstances they can take it all away. The most glaring issue is unlimited disk space. This means something other than disk space is being used to limit disk space. It is usually a clause regarding INODES or a general statement that lets the host close any website that exceeds their definition of "normal". Anyway, limiting INODES is a shady way of limiting disk space without placing a limit on the disk space in a way that normal people can understand. It is similar to saying that the number of disk sectors is limited. That directly limits the disk space, but still lets the host claim to offer unlimited disk space. In the end, unlimited disk space merely means limiting disk space by some method that is not directly obvious to the customer. Some people would call it lying. Actually, most people would. Unlimited bandwidth is done in a similar shady way. Instead of limiting the amount of bandwidth that can be used per month, they claim there is no monthly limit and instead implement a per second limit. The per second limit effectively creates a per month limit, but the marketting can state that no per month limit exists. It is just another example of telling the customer that the familiar unit of measure is set to unlimited and then using the TOS to define the limit using a less familiar unit of measure. It is not really unlimited at all. In truth, the limit for "unlimited" is simply hidden. It is kind of like a speed limit sign on a road that said "Unlimited MPH", but had small text under that it said "as long as you don't exceed 81 feet per second". Or maybe a road that let drivers go as fast as they wanted, but still limited the speed of the vehicle that the driver was in. Last edited by NoSupportLinuxHostin; 01-28-2010 at 10:28 PM.

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