Overselling Hosts
October 13, 2008
The business model used by a lot of hosts these days is “price ‘em low, stack ‘em high”, hence the low prices. But with that comes the strong possibility that you may be placed on a server that is being crippled by overselling.
I’ll try and explain it in a way that is easy to understand, all of my figures are estimates so try and bear with me 
I’d estimate that the average cost of a high end dedicated server will be costing the web host around $400 per month to run, and that’s not including the support costs, that’s simply the cost of the hardware and the cost of keeping the server online at the datacentre.
So if a web host charges a customer $5.95 per month for a hosting account, they need to fit roughly 68 customers on that server to meet the server costs each month. BUT….and this is where the overselling comes in – there is only so much disk space and bandwidth that you can have on 1 server.
Even with a massive 1TB – thats 1000GB, hardrive in the server, A host would only be able to fit 5 clients on that server IF they didn’t oversell.
This is based on the fact that web hosts provide each customer with on average, around 200GB of disk space, so 200GB * 5 customers would fill up the 1TB (1000GB) hard drive. So the income a hosting company would generate per server, IF they didn’t oversell, would only be $29.75 per month, which would be nowhere near enough to cover the $400 per month cost of running the server.
So it’s pretty obvious to all of us that lots of hosts out there DO oversell – But this isn’t actually a bad thing.
Just because a host oversells, it doesn’t mean they cripple their servers by putting too many users on each server, granted, some do but the majority handle overselling pretty well.
What the host does is put a simple little clause in their terms and conditions, stating that single clients must not use more than x% of CPU power or server resources at any one time. If a client reaches that amount, they will be asked to move onto a plan with more resources.
They also put clauses in there stating that the hosting must not be used purely for file download purposes, and must serve as an actual website. So if they ban you from running your own little file sharing network, then as you can image, it will be almost impossible to take up 200GB of disk space! 
You need not worry about using up x% of the CPU either, this would only happen if you had an incredibly high traffic, resource intensive website. And lets face it, if you are getting that much traffic to your site you should be able to afford to spend more than $6 per month on hosting!
So with all that in mind, take a look at my list below and I show you which hosts are currently overselling – it’s quite a long list! All figures are correct at the time of writing and are based on the standard Linux hosting package offered by the host, if you find any errors, or would like to add another host to the list, please let me know! (Contact link at top of the page)
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1and1 Hosting Review
October 10, 2008
Introduction
In all of my years working online, 1and1 are by far the worst web host that I have come across. 1and1 actually suck so bad, I’ve given them their own “mini-site” here on Dan Reviews. So I’ll do a very brief review here, but if you’d like to see all of my reasons for thinking so badly of them, please read my full 1&1 review.
Price
On first inspection the monthly prices look very reasonable, however 1&1 do have a minimum contract length of 6 months on their hosting packages (3 months on the developer/Pro packages), and you will be forced to pay all fee’s upfront before they activate your hosting account.
However this shouldn’t put you off too much, in today’s competitive hosting market the vast majority of hosts do have minimum contract lengths ranging from 3 to 24 months, very few hosts still use the month by month payment options, and if they do, the prices are usually higher than the 1&1 prices.
So all in all, the prices are very reasonable when compared with other hosts. But to be honest, the pricing would be the least of your worries if you decided to sign up with the devil of hosting companies, read on to find out why.
Reliability
When I was a 1and1 web hosting customer (I still get nightmares about it from time to time…), I suffered very little downtime on my Linux hosting package. Any site downtime that did occur was usually sorted out within the hour and was fixed with a simple server reboot.
Unfortunately the 1and1 internet POP3/IMAP email service wasn’t as reliable as the hosting, back at the start of 2007 I had a lot of problems receiving email to one of my 1&1 email addresses. Messages would take around 8 hours to get through the system so by the time they arrived in my email inbox, the person that sent me the email ended up waiting over 8 hours for a response. This continued for a couple of days, it hasn’t happened since but as you can imagine, it caused a lot of problems for the 2 days that it went AWOL for!
Control Panel
Now this is where things start to go downhill in my 1&1 review. Let me make a bold statement here:
THE 1AND1 CONTROL PANEL IS THE WORST HOSTING CONTROL PANEL I HAVE EVER COME ACROSS!
And that’s saying something considering I’ve also used Godaddy and Yahoo
There are loads of annoyances within the 1&1 control panel that I could review but you would probably get fed up of reading! (I mention them all in my full “1and1 suck” review)
I will though elaborate on one very important thing that I have come across with the 1&1 control panel on more than 1 occasion.
If you wish to cancel a contract, be VERY careful. The 1and1 system requires you to go to a separate website where you can manage your contracts, change or cancel any features or accounts with them. I have had numerous clients that wished to cancel their 1&1 hosting package, but they wanted to keep their domain name with 1and1 – big mistake!
On more than one occasion, the ultra-confusing 1&1 cancellation system has caused a number of my web design/consultation clients to lose domains. Instead of just cancelling the hosting package, 1and1 took it upon themselves to also get rid of the domain name. The domains, although they still had time remaining (meaning they hadn’t yet expired) suddenly had “no registrar”, this meant that for my clients to get their domains back, they needed a new registrar to take over the domain, which would have cost them £80 (about $160) – all because of 1and1′s crazy contract/cancellation system!
Also, you may get a visit from 1and1′s debt collection agency Arvato Finance….
Having transferred a domain name from 1 1and1 account to another, I was very surprised to hear that my client who I’d purchased the domain name for received a letter from a debt collection agency called Arvato Finance, demanding we paid them £9.68 for an un-paid domain name. I go into full detail about this on my blog, so head on over there if you want more information on Arvato Finances connection with 1and1 internet.
Features
If you have no previous website building knowledge and you are looking for a host that provides you with a WYSIWYG site builder, then by all means go for 1and1. However advanced users may become very disillusioned as 1and1 tend to provide more features for the novice web master, rather than helping the experienced clients.
Support
This is where things will start to get just a little bit ugly. A vital part of any hosting review is how the host handles support requests, as a customer you need requests answered in a timely and efficient manner, you would like to know details of any problems, and how these can be fixed.
If this is what you look for from a hosts support department – avoid 1&1 support!
The email and phone support is VERY limited, almost all of my support tickets were answered with a copy/paste standard reply which 9 times out of 10 would have no bearing on the original question I had asked them! If the problem required someone at 1and1 to actually do something with your account, the ticket would have to be escalated and then you would be placed in a queue before anything happened.
The support people that you deal with on a day to day basis really are the frist line of defence, they can read the “resolutions” from their screen but if you actually need any technical service, you will need to escalate your ticket to a higher level of their support department – and I use the term “support” very loosely!
Another Reason Why 1and1 Suck
As if I needed any more confirmation that 1and1 are the worst hosting company in the world, I just went into my domain management area to extend the renewal length of a domain I have with them – I wanted to register the domain for a further 2 years, rather than the standard 1 year.
To my surprise, I couldn’t find a way to do this in my 1&1 admin area, and there was nothing in the FAQ’s regarding my question so I decided to bite the bullet and contact the support team.
I received a reply in just under 12 hours, which is actually quite fast for them, but guess what? It’s not actually possible to purchase a domain name from 1and1 internet for more than a year at a time. Domains automatically renew for 1 year, every year, until canceled.
So if you are looking to secure your domain for longer than 12 months, make sure you don’t use 1and1 to register the domain!
Conclusion
I give a lot more reasons for my dislike of 1&1 in my full review, but for this short review. I will give you the following advice:
If you are looking for a new web host, DON’T go with 1&1 – bigger isn’t always better. Check out my other hosting reviews and you’ll be able to find a much better host.
If you are an existing 1and1 customer, please accept my condolences, and do be careful when trying to cancel any of your contracts!
My Final 1and1 Review Score:
(1 out of 5)
Your 1and1 Score:
(21 votes, average: 2.57 out of 5)
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- If You Still Want To Visit 1&1 By All Means Click Here! -
(UK Visitors Go Here)
Hostmonster Review
October 10, 2008
Introduction
Hello and welcome to this Hostmonster review. I actually wrote, and published this review before I launched this “Dan Reviews” website. So instead of re-printing my review in full here, I’ve taken snippets and turned them into the mini-review that you can see on this page. If you’d like to read my full Hostmonster review, please click here, or, if you’d prefer to read this version, let’s get started!
The Price
At the time of writing Hostmonster offers one set package to customers. The price of the package depends on the length of the contract you decide to take out – like most hosts, the longer you sign up for the cheaper your bill will be at the end of the month!
It is also worth noting that Hostmonster will supply you with a free domain name if you sign up to their hosting plan. When compared to other web hosts, I usually find that there isn’t much difference when it comes to pricing – almost everyone seems to fall within the same pricing range give or take a couple of dollars. However, not all hosts will offer you a free domain name. A domain name may not cost much nowadays but it’s always nice to get something for free!
Some people are very caucious however when purchasing a domain name from the same place you have hosting, some hosts may hold the domain name hostage if you cancel your hosting package, so do bear that in mind when trying to save a few dollars here and there.
Reliability
For the excellent uptime I have experienced whilst using Hostmonster I am going to give it top marks. This is the highest score I can give and, in my opinion, it is fully justified. My site has been online for the best part of 18 months and I have suffered no downtime and no business has been lost.
I say I’ve suffered “no downtime”, but in all honesty I’m not one of these people that sits at my PC 24 hours a day refreshing my website every couple of minutes. So it’s possible there was some downtime, but certainly no prolonged downtime that was noticed by both me, or my website visitors/customers.
Control Panel
I often feel that this is one of the most overlooked aspects of any web host. An easy-to-use control panel can save you hours of hard work. There are countless times I have been forced to stumble around a badly-designed control panel looking for features that might not even exist. Thankfully, Host monster uses the “cPanel” control panel.
The “cPanel” is my personal favourite control panel, mainly for its pleasant appearance and its layout. Everything that you would possibly need to do can be done from the “cPanel” and can usually be reached within a couple of clicks.
There are also tons of cPanel tutorials out there for you to use if you do run into problems. A quick search on Google for “cPanel 11 video tutorials” will yield thousands of results.
Features
It’s all well and good having a great pricing plan, control panel and uptime, but none if this matters unless the hosting plan has the features you need. As far as features go, you will find it difficult to top Hostmonster’s package. Here is a breakdown of what I feel are the most important parts of the Host monster package:
- 200 GB Disk Space
- 2,000 GB of Bandwidth (per month!)
- Host unlimited Domains
- Free Domain name
- Fantastico
- 100 MYSQL Databases
- PHP4 and PHP5 Support (You choose)
The first two bullet points are the first things you should look for in a host. This is the amount of disk space and bandwidth you will receive. 200 GB of Disk Space and 2,000 GB of Bandwidth will be more than enough for any website, even one packaged with multimedia files! I run a number of sites on my package and I have never come anywhere near my disk space or bandwidth allowance.
Hostmonster Overselling
This is a new section that I’m going to add to some of my hosting reviews. I can reveal that hostmonster DO oversell, but there’s no need to worry. Pretty much all of the big shared hosts do the same thing and it doesn’t make them any less viable as a choice for your business. Click here to read my hosting overselling review. (Opens in a new window)
Support
Last, but not least, I look at the single most important aspect behind any good webhost – the support system! Before you sign up to any web hosting program you should make sure that you know what type of support is available to you and how helpful that support is going to be when you do need to use it. I always send a test email with a general hosting question BEFORE I sign up with anyone – that way you can check too see how fast the response time is and how helpful the support is.
I did this test with Hostmonster and am pleased to say that they passed with flying colours. First of all I emailed them a rather technical question via their helpdesk; I asked them about ION CUBE (a PHP encryptor) and if they allowed you to edit the php.ini files. Within 2 hours my question had been answered by a friendly, competent technician and he even offered to do any ION CUBE installations for me if I had any problems.
Conclusion
As I mentioned at the start, the review on this page is only a very small snippet of my full review. You can find out why I didn’t give Hostmonster full marks by reading my full hostmonster review.
My Final Hostmonster Review Score:
(4 out of 5)
Your Hostmonster Score:
(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5) Loading ...
