Overselling
Comments(0) Well, first off, it has been a while since I’ve posted an article. I’ve been busy completing a three-month long project that has unfortunately been extended several times. Initially I started it in April and was planning on rebuilding the web hosting platform that I support my customers with. Thankfully I’m finally getting towards the end. Of course though, the last 5% is the most painful portion.
But none the less, I wanted to drop a post regarding the heated ‘Overselling’ delimma. For starters, I am a comfortable fan of overselling my services to my customers (to an extent) and I don’t find any company who follows this same ideal, within reason, at fault - even if I’m their customer.
Why are people so afraid of it?
I’m not really sure why soap box’n people are so afraid of it, but this is especially noticed around the web hosting industry. A market that has been trashed by price wars, yet continually you hear people on their soap box’s complaining about company X or company Y who is clearly overselling their services. Now I must admit, the occurence of overselling in web hosting does continually pose a problem because many of these companies, aren’t companies. They are simply websites setup in haste to sell web hosting services by people who do not know the first thing about providing services to customers let alone maintaining and supporting those services. But there are plenty of honest companies - my self included - who oversell our services to a reasonable extent. Why? Why not let your customers take the cost benefit of a the fact that 90% of customers will never use anywhere near 50% of their alloted services.
When is too much - too much?
As my example, the web hosting industry is a great example of where people are overselling way too far. It is obvious that Joe Blow’s Hosting cannot support nor facilitate 300 15Gb (all paying $1.95/mo - what a joke) web hosting accounts on a single server (with say 60Gbs of storage), nor can a “Dedicated Server” company provide a customer with 2000Gbs of bandwidth on a cap’d 5Mb connection (for those of you who are not aware that 5Mb x 320Gbs = 1600Gbs). All of which occurs all so frequently. However a reasonable web hosting company could easily support 200 200Mb web hosting accounts on a 60Gb drive (please note these figures aren’t exactly literal).
Who else oversells?
Besides the web hosting industry, numerous other markets are covered with legitimate companies overselling their services. A perfect example is cellular providers, I do not need literal figures to show that if every customer used their 1500 monthly minutes (or whatever they are allowed) it would be obvious that the cellular provider would not be able to support it. These companies bank on the fact that they know their customers aren’t going to use anywhere near 100% of their services. But if course if they do, there’s a huge chance that the customer will have overages to which the provider will make up for the use.