Alright, now that I think about it I probably would not have signed up with ASO had I not been desperate at the time looking for a new host. Not because of the extremely slow setup time, but because of the business model.

ASmallOrange, for the sake of your customers you have to lie to them. Or at least start quite a campaign on how you don't lie, try to teach the average joe what 'overselling' is, and try to make them insulted by the companies who offer it.

Oversellers own the market. People who offer unbelievable amounts like 4 TBs of bandwidth for $5 or even occurring more and more lately - 'unlimited'. They can't offer those amounts, it's physically impossible, but it works. Noobs go to them who aren't going to use anything anyway, and all the profit they get allows them to actually support those who do use a lot cheaply.

It's no longer dirty to oversell, it's business. To not oversell makes you look like one of the thousands of garage-sale hosting companies who don't know any better.


PS: The setup process really needs to be automated.


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For the sake of not making this completely negative. Things I did like...

- The name.
- The special hosting plan, ASOextreme. Great idea.
- Coupons for referrals. Genius, needs to be advertised.
- Great and fast Email support.

TBH I'm glad ASO don't oversell. When I joined two years ago I purposefully looked for smaller packages for my money because I knew impossible packages meant overselling, which normally comes with poor support and bad stability.

Just because lots of people do it doesn't make it any less wrong. Lots of politicians take bribes, but that doesn't mean they all should.

I like the fact that ASO don't aim for the "easily swayed newbie" market. Given the choice between some "all the unidentified meat coked by greasy 16 year old on minimum wage you can eat for £3.50" and "100% beef in a home-made burger with home-made relish, all in a nice bun with nice chips, all cooked by a chef for £5" I'd much rather go for the chef's burger!

As for automated sign-up, that's another double-edged sword. Not having it would give people the "instant response" hosting they're used to. But having it has the much greater advantage of catching more spammers/abusers/fraudsters before they get an account and start spamming/hacking/spending someone else's money. Again, I'd rather eat at a restaraunt that takes 10 minutes to serve you but has better clientelle than some scuzzy fast food joint that'll take all customers, including the ones buying on someone else's card and mugging people.

I don't see how your comparisons to food apply. Overselling does not cause poor support or 'bad stability'. It's simply a more effective strategy than throwing away space and bandwidth on clients that won't use it. How companies handle themselves when they get much bigger thanks to overselling is a completely different story.

There's no room for 'Ma and Pa owned' businesses on the internet. It's either go big or not at all.


About the automated setup, you have to remember that this is the internet. Everything is automated to a degree already. And just as actions can be automated, so can security be built in.

Even though the sign-up is not automated, it's very fast.

I signed up a few years ago and had my account in 5 minutes. I left for a while (not due to service issues)

I signed back up this week, and was setup in about 5 minutes or less again, pretty darn quick. I even sent another email asking for ssh access and got it back a minute later saying it was done.

We don't automate our sign-up because of fraudulent transactions. We have too many of those to let everything through. But Amanda and Kathleen monitor them 7 days a week, so you're never more than a few hours away from an account (usually minutes).

Just two more things I'd like to respond to:

I'm not really keen on getting negative on the competition. Plus, it's OK for them to take their piece of the pie. That's not the niche we're going for with our service. This is a business where 0.1% of the market is a huge chunk, so we can't expect to convince everyone out there. I'd rather just concentrate on bringing in the customers that get what we're trying to do and that we fit as their ideal host.

It's in the signup emails and on the billing area main page. We've also announced it here on the forums a bit. It's sort of self-advertising anyways I do think it will be a little bit more prominent in our upcoming site redesign, though.

Overselling doesn't necessarily cause poor support, but it normally goes hand-in-hand in my experience. Bad stability is more likely with oversold servers, though.

Sun is currently running with <1 load, which means fast and smooth running. If someone gets a sudden spike, Sun might jump to ~2 or 3, which would still be fairly smooth. On a server that is oversold and running ~4+ when it should be <2 then a spike from a single user will be more noticeable and more problematic. You've also got more users on the server, so more chance of it occurring.

Believe me, my previous host upgraded to their own hardware in the Equinix data centre and decided that a load of 10+ was perfectly fine and wouldn't bring it any lower. The servers were oversold and the slightest spike caused major slowdowns. I even saw load hit 180 at one point, which would be more difficult if the initial load is lower and there are fewer customers.

You say people don't use things, but at the moment Sun is over 80% used. I'm using 90%+ of my disk space on a Medium package and I've had months where I've used 120%+ of my bandwidth. Not everyone will be like that, but the whole problem with overselling is that you're judging the impossible - what a group of customers will/won't use. You can have guidelines, but get it wrong and you affect everyone on the server.

The food analogy was the "masses cheap stuff because we can and people don't care about quality" versus "more reasonable but less of it" aspect. I guess some aspects are reversed (in that situation it would be the cheap stuff being thrown away) but the general idea is there.

Security can be built in to automated systems, but it's still not as foolproof as user control. I work with some secure systems and they purposefully don't allow machines to make the decisions and put the emphasis on machines supporting human decisions entirely because a human is better at making the decision in many situations.

Tim: I'm glad you're planning on staying that way. There's definitely an obvious difference between the originally mentioned "garage hosts" (who are generally unprofessional in appearance/behaviour, or they're obviously old hosting companies who just never updated) and ASO's "smaller but not oversold" packages.

That's what I'm getting at. Overselling has nothing to do with quality.

Your stretching the truth, which in turn gives more customers. They still pay the same. More customers doesn't mean less quality if the company is well-managed, in fact it could mean much greater quality.


Transparent server transfers could fix this. Having servers for people that don't use anything, then servers for people who use a little, and etc.



Right now there is a flood of 'noobs' going into web hosting. After the flood is over with, I predict that there is only going to be a few super companies, like everything else in America. Except with the net, there is no 'local' or 'small' business. The entire world has equal access to all of you.

After the super companies are established, it will be impossible to compete with them. And then they will make the rules, just like the phone companies.

You should be for or against overselling, and use it in your marketing strategy. 'Noobs' don't think about these things logically, I can't tell you how many of them have offered me hosting help because they don't they had boundless power.

Not in terms of causation, but there often is in terms of correlation in my experience.

AFAIK that's basically impossible with anything but static sites, and if the user ever uses the server name/ip (e.g. to get SSL on POP without getting "certificate doesn't match" warnings) then it can never be entirely transparent. The database dependency means you need to either close the modifiable parts or risk losing data, or else modify the config of every dynamic script to point the old code to the database on the new server, which isn't transparent and would (I think) require extra config in terms of letting user X on server Y access database A on server B.


I'm not an expert, but I think that's one of the worse ways to balance things. If you put all the high use users together then they're more likely to spike the server load as the higher than normal use of one user causes a chain reaction that slows down other sites, potentially causing more load, and so on.

I think that's the reason why ASO put mixed accounts on a server and let you upgrade without moving (from what I read when I joined then Tim even keeps space aside for expansion).


It's a good job the Net is a global thing, then, and a great leveller. We don't have any problem with phone companies in the UK, or gas/electricity/water companies. It's a competitive market and each company is fighting for a user base. One of the big broadband providers even got a complaint recently after they contacted a group of customers of another company to point out why they might be better off switching.

As my point of it being a leveller, yes, a company might have more money behind it, but more money doesn't necessarily mean success on the Internet. Look at how many things have started small and grown huge in short order. The fact that it is global also increases the market, meaning that an even smaller market share than a high street store can still be huge and be very profitable.

While lots of people may flock to "the big thing" I think there's enough logical webmasters like me who don't jump on the MySpace/unlimited bandwidth/Web 2538.0 "lets have un-navigable websites because we can" band wagon's to keep companies like ASO viable.

Therre always a flood of noobs getting into hosting, and most of them oversell and are out of business in a year. It is a huge market and will never be completely dominated by a very small number of companies.

Oversellers have to put restrictions in their TOS to actually keep people from using all those resoruces they are selling them. The more they oversell, when people actually try and use the resources they have paid for, the harsher they enforce said restrictions and generate ill will in the process.

I'm sure you wouldn't be happy if your ISP sold you a broadband account advertised at Gig-E speeds and unlimited transfer and then limited you to http, pop and cut you off after the third ISO download that month, or limited the speed to 1 mbps during prime time, etc. You get the idea

When I went looking for a web host one of the things I looked for was a host that didn't oversell, or did so only minimally. Maybe perceptually I pay a bit more at ASO, but effectively and practically I don't.

I'm under the impression that ASO doesn't expand beyond its need to meet current customers' demands. By that I mean, the money made from current customers covers the cost of maintaining those customers' servers, paying the staff, etc. When someone starts to consume more resources (i.e., VPS-level resources), they pay a proportionally larger amount that goes to covering the cost of those resources. When ASO needed additional capital, they temporarily offered lifetime hosting plans in order to raise that money while continuing to provide the rest of us with quality service. Since ASO hasn't shut down yet, I'm assuming that they make enough money to keep the business running and let Tim pay his bills.

If you look in the forums (especially the pre-sales questions), you'll see people asking why the prices are higher than other hosts who "offer more." Then we explain about overselling and how ASO doesn't do it. Some of those people stay; some don't. I hope those who don't have found hosts that suit their needs, whatever they perceive those needs to be.

I think what Tim is trying to point out is that getting more customers isn't what drives the business. As a shared hosting customer, I value the fact that ASO's priority is providing us with quality service and giving us exactly the amount of space and bandwidth for which we paid.

I would be very suspicious of a company that "stretches the truth" to get more customers. Advertising slogans are all well and good, but I want companies who are upfront about what I can expect from their services. Case in point, ASO makes it clear that you can buy extra bandwidth, but you can't buy extra space unless you upgrade. Whether or not I agree with this policy aside, I appreciate the fact that they've informed me about it beforehand. Fine print is annoying.

Actually, one of the main reasons I chose ASO is because they don't oversell and don't promise more than they can deliver.

I learned my lesson on Go Daddy. They are notorious for overselling. Over time, the hosting quality decreased steadily to the point that at peak times forum page loads would take 20 - 30 seconds per page. Just doing basic forum administrative tasks took forever as a result. It was a waste of my time and was very frustrating. Even though ASO charged slightly more and offered less space and data transfer, that was OK because even on ASO I have not come close to using up all that is available. On Go Daddy, I rarely used 1% of the total data transfer. So anything over and above that was a waste. Given their poor quality as a result of overselling, it just wasn't worth it.

Anyone experienced with web hosting is going to avoid oversellers. Newbies may be tempted by the outrageous resources offered, as was I when I first started, but people who know what a good web host is about are to avoid oversellers like the plague. So, overselling is actually going to turn off many customers, not bring them in. Anyone who has been on an overseller's server is not going to want to go to another one.

Your theory isn't correct.

im on the tiny package i run two PHPbb3 forums with no downtime i rarely use over 40% of my bandwidth
the one time i had trouble with my server the response and solution was quicker than i could figure out what was going on
for £25 a year i wouldn't change it for anything

And even better, you're getting it for about £12.50 because a Tiny is $25 and there's ~$2 per £1 at the moment

[edit] I just renewed some .com domains at NameCheap and noticed the following after I finished my payment. It seems even companies bigger than ASO aren't automated:


(Emphasis is mine)

This is exactly one of the reasons I recommended we go with ASmallOrange. They don't lie and offer reasonable limits. I'd much rather be pinched for space than be ignored by support and limited to, oh, 2 MySQL databases. I truly value honesty in a company, and so someone recommending a business to lie (bluntly mind you) really tends to irk me. My company site at this point is on the Small package, and other than being slightly tight on space (mostly due to a huge SMF fourm+arcade), it's been pretty good.

Honesty vs. a little more space is an easy decision for me. I'll take the former any day. If I were to make one suggestion though, it might be to offer extra disk space for an extra cost (as you do with bandwidth). Maybe not even as much as your extra bandwidth ($1/GB), maybe like half a gig for $1-2. I'd consider that a great addition, versus overselling.

$25 is what i meant ^^ finger must have hit the wrong one >_<

but yea ASO doesn't try to lie or even need to lie

and even better is they get involved with their customers and they are able to because they don't over sell and have millions of members experiencing the same problem at the same time its like a quaint little local corner shop but on a global market and it works

I'd say anyone slightly experienced with web hosting knows to avoid oversellers. I learned of oversellers when at 1and1.com ( which is terrible ), and went on the 'don't go with a overseller' thing for a bit...

But I realized that it is simply a smart business decision to oversell when dealing with such a market like this. It may have been 'lying' at first, but now it is the standard.

Choosing a host can only be done right by recommendations and personal experience. Forums for popular systems such as SimpleMachines or vBulletin are ideal to search for these recommendations.


With oversellers such as HostGator, the restrictions are CPU / nodes, and also that your not permitted to have sites like a file host. Of course like every big company their TOS allows you to terminate your account if they simply feel like it.

Could potentially use up to that space/bandwidth. Very, very tricky to do though.


It's not that they oversell, but that they suck. Their site is filled with crap and is slow itself. And simply searching for reviews of GoDaddy will tell you it's a horror story.

"Overselling does not mean poor quality", that is correct. There may be a high correlation, but I am sure there is also a very high correlation between non-over sellers and bad service as well. Have you any idea how many garage-sale hosting 'companies' are out there?

Can anyone at least agree on that if ASO isn't to oversell, it should at least take a stance against it in campaign form?

ASO has it's niche, and Tim seems happy with it where it is. Being a privately-owned company they're under no obligation to stockholders to do whatever is necessary to expand as much as possible. If you can provide good service to the customers you have and keep them from leaving you don't need to worry about getting new ones as fast. Or something. Dunno.

Which would leave you with three corolations:

1) hosts that oversell tend to be poor
2) hosts that are run on the side by someone in their garage tend to be poor
3) hosts that are run properly ad don't oversell tend not to be poor

I'll leave it up to the reader as to where ASO fits.

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/how-to-choose-a-web-host/



http://www.anelectron.com/board/index.php?...&printtopic



http://forum.cs-cart.com/archive/index.php/t-6288.html



There is no shortage of results for the search "stay away from oversellers". It looks like oversellers have a bad reputation...and there is a reason for that, despite your arguments to the contrary.



As I said, Go Daddy was just fine for the first year or so. Then the server got slower and slower and slower. The reason is because they were cramming accounts onto it.



If there is a high correlation, there is probably a reason for that high correlation. It isn't just pure randomness that oversellers have bad reputations, you know.



http://asmallorange.com/services/hosting/

I think their package details are enough of a statement. Theoretically it would be possible for a host offering smaller packages to be an overseller by cramming thousands of accounts on a server. But, if they were going to do something like that, they probably would just be blatant oversellers and offer ridiculously huge accounts and data transfer. Poor quality is poor quality, right? If you are going to be an overseller, you might as well be the one that offers too much because it will entice people such as yourself to sign up.

People like me who have learned their lesson with oversellers, on the other hand, will take our business elsewhere.

I do not want to host any sites on an overseller. I don't want the host I am currently on (ASO) to become an overseller. I have had my problems on ASO, to be sure, but as of this writing I am happy here and would like it to stay like this forever.

No experienced webhost is going to choose an overseller. Oversellers have targeted one market niche, ASO has targeted another.

I will never again host any site on an overseller. I learned my lesson before. Your arguments have done not one thing to change my feelings toward oversellers and I'll bet that you have convinced no one else.

There is a high correlation for both non-oversellers and oversellers.

The only difference is that oversellers own most of the reputation.



1) Hosts tend to be poor quality or service.
2) Oversellers are far more popular.
3) Companies which are run properly are run more properly.

over sellers are great for the "look mummy i can buildz wubsute ya?" 12 year old kids who dont know and preferably don't care
the people on the other hand who do care and most practically do know avoid them like the plague, in which if ASO did start to oversell they will probably loose most of their respected members
if for example IBBoard, Jed, Jermey, Nyteowl left that's most of the forum tech support dead and if they left because the servers became unstable due to overselling then there's really something wrong with that

so my point is don't fix what isnt broken ASO arnt loosing anything by not overselling so why do it?