Here is a little excerpt of my conversation with Siteground. As you can see they really try to dodge my questions about how much space a server really has.

You are now speaking with Maria of Sales Department.Maria: Hello JC

Maria: Welcome to SiteGround.com Hosting Services!

JC: Hello Maria.

Maria:

JC: Can you tell me how long you have been in business?

Maria: SiteGround has been in this business since 2003 and we have been expanding it thanks to the incomparable quality of services we provide.

Maria: Also, we have proved ourselves by some of the awards you can see here if you like:

Maria: http://www.siteground.com/about_us.htm

JC: Do you allow overselling on the reseller accounts?

Maria: Could you please hold on a second so that I can transfer you to one of our experienced senior sales assistants for better assistance

Maria: do you mind, please?

JC: Ok

Please hold while being transferred to Valentin of Senior Sales Department.

You are now speaking with Valentin of Senior Sales Department.

Valentin: Hello JC

Valentin: Could you please allow me a second to review the conversation above

JC: Hello Valentin.

JC: Sure

Valentin: Could you please elaborate a little bit for better assistance?

JC: Well, you know how you offer 750 Gigs of webspace?

JC: For your reseller plan.

JC: Can I really use all 750 Gigs?

Valentin: Overselling is a situation when the company cannot deliver the resources it advertises, which is not our case. At SiteGround, every customer gets as much resources as they have paid for. Our system administrators have introduced innovative technologies to balance and optimize the load on our servers so that every customer gets the resources they paid for. You will be able to use 750,000MB space, 7500GB traffic, and all else any time you need those.

JC: May I ask then how many customers do you have roughly on a Reseller server?

Valentin: Well our techs are always balancing our servers and on each server there is a different number of customers so that the server is on its best performance.

JC: Ok, so lets say you had just 25 resellers on one server. Do you have any idea how much disk space that is? Thats more than your server can probably handle wouldn’t you say?

Valentin: if you need that much disk space, you are welcome to use the 750GB disk space for each account that you are going to open.

JC: So you are basically telling me that this space is on the server and available for multiple resellers?

Valentin: This space if for each account that you are going to open.

Valentin: If you have with your reseller plan 5 account, each of them will have 750GB disk space.

JC: Ok. So if I were to open a few accounts you are telling me that you have a server that has terabytes of diskspace just sitting there?

Valentin: That is correct, You will be able to use 750,000MB space, 7500GB traffic for each account that you have.

JC: Wow!! Thats amazing. Do you know thats called overselling if you really don’t have it? Its amazing how you will tell me it is available. But the real truth is, that if I were to use it all I would run into a possible two problems. Either system resources or I would go over the Inode limit. I am sorry but I believe that you are not being truthful with me.

Valentin: May I ask what type of websites you are planning to build>

Valentin: ?

JC: They will be blogs. About 2500 of them actually. Updated each and every day by many people.

Valentin: Hosting so many blogs, I would personally advise you to consider a dedicated solution.

JC: I will not need that though since I will have plenty of diskspace and bandwidth that you provide.

Valentin: We basically the disk space and the traffic aren’t the most critical factor for hosting so much websites which will be viewed and updated by many visitors

Valentin: They will require a lot of server resources.

JC: And that is my point Valentin. That is the catch to giving all that Diskspace and bandwidth. Am I correct on that?

Valentin: On a shared hosting server you will be able to host quite big websites smoothly, however for such a number a dedicated servers is the perfect choice.

Valentin: I would recommend you a dedicated server for so many and that big as you specified websites.

Valentin: http://www.siteground.com/dedicated_servers.htm

JC: I would like to ask a direct question and get a direct answer if thats ok. How much diskspace does the reseller server have in total?

Valentin: Each account has 750GB disk space, sir.

Valentin: you are welcome to use them

Valentin: Big that big site will require a lot server resource.

JC: I understand. All I wanted to know is what the server itself held in total.

JC: May I ask why the highest end server only has 500 gigs available? Thats less than a reseller plan.

Valentin: With the dedicated server you will the whole server resource just for you. The server resources are very important with hosting heavy websites as youtube etc..

JC: Ok. Thanks Valentin. I appreciate all your help.

JC: Have a great evening.

Valentin: You are most welcome, JC.

I recently went to the theater to watch “August Rush” which was a well put together movie I must say. Great movie for a family to see. As I was standing in line to get popcorn with my wife I waited and waited and waited as the guy behind the counter just went as slow as an employee could go. I began to wonder why someone could be so slow when I have a movie thats starting in less than 2 minutes. Did this guy have no motivation because of the pay he was receiving, or was it the fact that He just didn’t care about offering good customer service?

Making sense of it all

I know this is a odd way to compare to hosting, but just think for a moment. Does it seem like your host ever just takes their time with what they tell you they may be able to do in a short time? Like any customer service now days, everyone in the western world expects answers and solutions quickly. If your hosting company doesn’t address things as quick as you would like them too wouldn’t it be good to find out the reason?

Going back to the guy at the Movie theater, I started thinking to myself that it was possible that this guy that I was in line waiting to get popcorn from may have had a long day of work and was tired and maybe that accounted for the slower pace. Maybe he was mentally slow or not quite as competent as other people working there. The expressions on this guys face were not that of carelessness and he was even very courteous, so this helped me to realize that my wanting the popcorn and drink right away was possibly not the full spectrum of things. Had I come 15 minutes early to the movie I would not have been in such a mad rush.

Whats going on with hosting

The point being here in application to your hosting is, sometimes you may not always see what is going on in the background where the actual people that host you work. For the fact that you may host your business which is your livelyhood, yes you have a right to expect uptime, but this is not the issue I am referring too. Whenever you may be moving the contents of a site and your host does it for free, keep in mind that there may also be 200 other people that have requested this before you. Keep in mind that when you are waiting for your site to propagate, that your hosting company can’t control that speed. When you have made an error of your own and deleted content from your own site, that was your mistake, don’t expect for your host to have your site restored within minutes. Or the fact that you may be asked to put in a ticket when you need something majorly changed on your site so that it can be documented.

We all expect good service thats no question, but many times our own forethought can save us a lot of trouble whether its related to hosting or its as simple as getting popcorn at a theater.

You ever wonder if the host you purchased from or are planning to purchase from has been around for a while? here are a few hosting tips that might help you to decide whether its a good bet to host with them or not.

A good way to see for yourself how long the hosting company has been around is to do a “whois” search on them. You can go to domaintools.com and search the name of your hosting companies domain and see how long it has been around. It will show when the domain was registered. This will give you an idea of how long they have been around as an online presence, which is important.

Another thing that will show as well is the Alexa traffic of the site which will also help give you an idea if they receive much traffic and are a company that will be sticking around for a while. The alexa traffic is not purely accusrate so don’t base all your decision on it.

Another thing that you can do as well is look at how many other sites are being hosted on the same server. It will give you a number of results that are found. This will tell you if the company is small. If so, then it will have quite a few other sites being hosted most of the time on the same server including its own site. It may also be a reseller account that was purchased from another hosting company. If it shows that only that site is the only one or there are few others then it may be that this host gets plenty for traffic and has its own dedicated server just for itself, in which case you will know that they are a bit more established.

I hope you have enjoyed these hosting tips and you find value in finding the right host for you.