What is hosting overselling and how can you spot it?

If your website sometimes slows down or stops responding for no obvious reason, your hosting provider may be overselling.

What is hosting overselling?

Overselling overselling happens when a provider sells more storage, memory or bandwidth than its servers could deliver if every customer used their full allowance at once.

It is common on shared and low-cost plans. If several sites need a lot of resources at the same time, performance can suffer.

Consequences of overselling

• Longer page load times.
• Intermittent outages.
• Loss of visitors or sales.
• Difficulty scaling your website.

Effects on search visibility

Frequent outages and slow pages make a website harder to use and can affect how well search engines can crawl it.

• Google takes page experience into account, with load performance among the signals it measures..
• If your server repeatedly returns errors when Google crawls the site, pages can eventually drop out of the index.
• Visitors may also leave before the page has finished loading.

Over time, that can mean less visibility and fewer opportunities to attract customers..

How can you tell whether your host oversells?

These signs can warrant a closer look:

• The site is sometimes responsive and sometimes very slow, with no clear change on your end.
• Your provider is unable to explain the CPU or memory limits.
• Many sites share the same server resources.
• The provider makes no performance commitments.

Monitor loading times and resource use. To get an initial view, you can test your site with GTmetrix, which reports key performance metrics.

Choosing a hosting provider

At in4byte, we set hosting limits around the resources we can provide.We offer web hosting with clear resource allocations and local support from our team in Granada.

Unsure whether your hosting plan is causing your site to slow down?

Get in touch for an initial review of your current hosting. We’ll explain what we find and what options make sense.