The Overselling business model

Overselling is a big trend in the web-hosting world at the moment. It’s an easy way to get more out of your servers than normally is possible. The basic idea of overselling is the assumption that the majority of your clients will only use a fraction of the resources allocated to them so there’s going to be a lot of wasted bandwidth and space. Overselling involves taking a risk and selling more than you can handle assuming that the unused resources will cover it.

Let’s say for example that a server hard drive is 80GB and has 1200GB of bandwidth. The hosting company has a look around and decides that to be competitive they need to offer plans with 2GB of disk space and 40GB bandwidth. With these figures they can only offer 30 hosting packages per server. This leaves quite a bit of wasted disk space and after a few months the company will probably notice that their users aren’t using all of the available bandwidth. Because of this the company then assumes that it can safely sell at least 10 more packages on the one server. If the original number of customers already covers general costs then the extra packages provided by overselling are pure profit.

The advantage of overselling for the host is that they make more money off each server than they otherwise normally would be able to. The advantage for the client is that this extra revenue is usually transferred on (at least in theory) by cheaper hosting packages with more features.

The problem is that these features are often ‘smoke and mirrors’. A few users would be able to use their entire allotment without any trouble, but if every single client were to build their website up to maximum capacity the host wouldn’t be able to handle the sudden increase in demand without adding extra hard drives, buying more bandwidth, or perhaps even another server. This would most likely lead to a fair amount of congestion and maybe even downtime.

Web hosts aren’t going to advertise the fact that they oversell. It’s not something that will gain them customers and it’s likely to drive away a few. In general however, they’re likely to get away with it without any real problems. The reason the idea even exists is that it is true that the majority of websites don’t use all of the space that’s allocated to them. The problem is that it’s not a particularly honest way of dealing with clients.

Overselling will generally not be a problem unless a host gets too greedy and ends up selling much more than they could possibly provide for. On the other hand, it’s not even necessary as the host can usually make enough money to make ends meet without overselling. It will generally be quite difficult for you to find out whether or not a host oversells unless they specifically advertise it, or they’re well known for having problems due to excessive overselling.

Just make sure you do some research and choose a reliable host, not necessarily the one that appears to offer ridiculous amounts of bandwidth or disk space for far too little money.

As my grandfather used to say, if something is too good to be true …, it usually is. First sniff and then review your choices.

Publishing your website using Fireftp

The process of transferring a file from your computer to your website is often referred to as “uploading”. This guide only deals with how you can transfer a file to your web server using a free FTP client known as fireftp. Fireftp is a great add-on for the Firefox web browser. There are many other free FTP programs but this guide will only deal with fireftp.

What is FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol.  Both HTTP and FTP protocols deal with transferring data across the Internet. FTP is used to upload and download files from your computer to a web server. Download http://fireftp.mozdev.org

Once downloaded follow the the on-screen intructions to install fireftp.

Using Fire FTP

1. Click on Tools the select FireFTP
2. Once FireFTP is open follow these steps to Connect to your Server.
3. Click on Manage Accounts
4. Select New…
5. Go to the "Account Name" field and enter the hostname (usually the website name, i.e cityofmonash.com)
6. Go to the "Host" field and enter the hostname (as above)
7. Go to the "Login" field and enter your FTP username as setup in VHCS2 (ie (Aktiviere JavaScript, um die Email-Adresse zu sehen))
8. Go to the "Password" field and enter your FTP password (please note this is case sensitive
9. Click OK to save the account information and to close the dialog.
10. Click on "Connect" to establish a connection.
11. Click OK on the FireFTP pop-up and fireftp will connect to the FTP server

Once you have Connected, you will  find that the local files are on your left and the remote files on your right. You can click on a local file and press the arrow pointing to the right to upload a file to the server.

Similarly, you can click on a file on the right side and press the arrow pointing to the left to
download a file from the server to your computer.

Where should I publish the website content?

All website content files need to be placed in the htdocs directory or folder.

What filename should I use as the default page for my Website?

The web server will look for the following files when no page in the URL is provided.

index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml (all files are case sensitive)

What file permissions should I use?

The UNIX security model allows you to set different levels of access to a file for different groups of people. This allows you to let the web server modify a file via a CGI script, for instance, while preventing other users from having normal access to the file. There are three groups in terms of file access, and three different permission types they can receive.

File Permissions And Groups

The groups are:

• User – the ‘user’ group consists only of the owner of the file (your account, in most cases)
• Group – the ‘group’ group consists of the other users on the server — you can usually remove their permissions entirely if you think it is necessary
• Other – the ‘other’ group consists of everyone else — most importantly, the web server falls into the ‘other’ category

The potential permissions are:

• Read – the ‘read’ permission allows a user or program the ability to read the data in a file
• Write – the ‘write’ permission allows a user or program the ability to write new data into a file, and to remove data from it
• Execute – the ‘execute’ permission allows a user or program the ability to execute a file, if it is a program or a script

Setting Permissions

You can set permissions via FTP by right-clicking (clicking and holding for Mac users) on the file and select Properties in fireftp.

Most of your html files will do fine with a permission of 644 (Owner=Read+Write Group=Read Other=Read). Most script files will need a permission of 755 (Owner=Read+Write+Execute Group=Read+Execute Other=Read+Execute).

Can FireFTP resume downloads?

Yes it can. If you lose your connection, FireFTP will automatically try to reconnect and resume downloading. After this, you can resume a file just by trying to download it again. FireFTP will notice that you have a partial file already downloaded and will ask you whether you want to resume from where you left off click "Resume".

How do I rename a file/make a directory/delete files?

Right-click on the file lists. A context menu will appear showing the available functions you have, along with related keyboard shortcuts.

What is the "View on the Web" feature and what do you put in "Host" and "Prefix" for it to work?

The "View on the Web" feature is primarily designed for web developers so that they can preview images and webpages within FireFTP (using Firefox's latest Canvas technology). It can be found on the "Account Manager" dialog, under the Advanced tab.

If experiencing problems with your connection, follow these steps.

• Do you have the latest versions of FireFTP and Firefox? The latest version can be found at http://fireftp.mozdev.org/
• Are you behind a firewall? Try turning it off temporarily to see if it is the source of your problem. If so, you might have to configure your software to allow FireFTP to access the Internet.
• Does your server allow only active mode? Try turning off "Passive Mode" in FireFTP under your account's configuration options. This is found on the "Account Manager" dialog, under the Connection tab.
• Do you use a proxy? Try setting the proxy under Preferences in the Connections sub menu.
• Have you been able to connect with other FTP clients? Please check to see if the problem is reproducible with other FTP clients.

This should allow your FTP client to establish a connection.