That very much depends on the hosting company. There is no set % that a host will oversell by. You have some that oversell only a little bit (like myself) then you have others that are extreme overselling (like 1&1, site5, netfirms, yahoo). Is there a certain host you are looking at?
Nobody certain, I'm just asking.... I have a resseler account and I'm selling hosting to my friends so I just curious how much is ok to oversell p.l.u.r.
One of the easier ways to figure out how much they are overselling is to compare the shared/reseller plan to a dedicated server. Look at the specs and the price and if the numbers don't make sense then you can tell how much they oversell. ex. Charge $19.95 for a reseller account that has 40 GB storage and 1TB transfer. The dedicated server with 80GB storage and 1TB transfer they charge $110/month. See how the numbers really don't make sense?
I see what you mean but you have missed my point. I would like to know how much could I oversell without getting in trouble of running out of space/bandwith.... Lets say that I had 2gb of space and 30gb of bandwith, how big packages could I (over)sell p.l.u.r.
A reasonable amount woud be 1.5x how much you have. If you see customers using 0.1% of space, go crazy and oversell 40000000000000000000x more.
And when they start using 10% of space my server will crash, no thanks I will monitor couple of accounts and then make a decision about how much I could oversell, I think that is the best method... p.l.u.r.
Overselling in a professional enviorment is never, ever a good idea. There are so many snags. It may seem like a waste of space when a client does not use their resources, but with Paladin Systems anway, the client has paid for those resources; if they don't use them, no one will. That selling practice has served us very well.
Simply put if you cannot provide what you have sold you will get burnt. It might not be today or tomorrow, but it will happen. When it does you will probably lose 100% of your hosting clients and reputation. So, the amount you should oversell is 0%. Well, it might mean that you struggle to gain clients, but in the end your clients will be happy and will not have a reason to go somewhere else. The no overselling policy has served me well in the fact that I have had a 0 churn in over 3 years of providing hosting. My customers are delighted that they can use 100% of disk allocation and 100% of their bandwidth allocation and never worry about it not being available. We only promise what we can deliver and deliver what we promise. Sure, it means that people who shop on price go elsewhere, but then again those same people are so busy changing hosts that they never have time to create and maintain their sites.
A lot of the popular webhosts like Bluehost and DreamHost oversell to make their packages look bigger.