{"id":2423,"date":"2018-08-14T07:00:30","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T07:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ssdnodes.com\/blog\/?p=2423"},"modified":"2025-06-12T10:39:25","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T10:39:25","slug":"lets-talk-about-vps-overselling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/blog\/lets-talk-about-vps-overselling\/","title":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s talk about VPS overselling"},"content":{"rendered":"

At $10 a month, I would be concerned with serious overselling with those specifications and very outdated hardware.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Deal seems to be good but chances are there that the server will be oversold.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We understand the assumption. We see it all the time.<\/p>\n

I pulled both of those comments from a recent WebHosting Talk thread<\/a>. While SSD Nodes isn\u2019t mentioned, it\u2019s not hard to deduce that we\u2019re the VPS provider in question. The fact that no one knows that the original poster is talking about us, which means that each of the replies is unbiased in its assessment of the facts (how much RAM\/disk\/etc. for how much money), offers a genuinely transparent look into how people perceive what we\u2019re offering.<\/p>\n

Before I get into rebutting those comments, it\u2019s time for a short story.<\/p>\n

While mountain biking with a friend just before sitting down to write this very post, we chatted about that adage about having to pick only two<\/em> between strong<\/em>, cheap<\/em>, and light<\/em>. I had just broken my rear derailleur\u2014that strange, somewhat claw-like mechanism lets you move from one gear to another\u2014and I was lamenting the fact that bikes with gearboxes weren\u2019t commonplace yet. That was when he threw the \u201cpick two\u201d dilemma my way. I could go out and buy a gearbox equipped bike today, but prices for the Zerode Taniwha<\/a> can easily reach $10,000.<\/p>\n

My friend is an engineer, hence the focus on materials, but it\u2019s not hard to make the jump into VPS territory: choose two between fast<\/em>, cheap<\/em>, and reliable<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When talking about VPS providers and plans, people tend to operate within that mindset. They see the plan\u2019s specs and price, do a little mental map, and decide as to where it falls within that never-crossing Venn diagram. They see how much RAM we offer per dollar and assume that we\u2019re highly oversold, as that seems<\/em> like the only way to make the economics work.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we\u2019ve launched a new feature to prove that we\u2019re not oversold. And it\u2019s something that no other<\/em> VPS provider is willing to talk about, much less put some data behind.<\/p>\n

Squashing the VPS overselling assumption with... data<\/h2>\n

Back in July, we quietly introduced a new section on our our homepage<\/a>. Scroll down about halfway and find our usage graph<\/strong>, which displays the average hour CPU usage across our infrastructure of host nodes over the last 24 hours.<\/p>\n

\"VPS<\/p>\n

A telltale sign of an oversold VPS provider is high host node CPU usage. If the host node has no more CPU power to deliver to its many many servers, that\u2019s when VPS users start to see the massive slowdowns commonly attributed to overselling.<\/p>\n

As you can see, both in the static image about and on our homepage itself<\/a>, our CPU usage trends between 35 and 40% of maximum. Plenty of room to handle the burst CPU capacity that we\u2019re happy to offer our users in their times of need, like when they get a surge of unexpected traffic. That\u2019s unquestionably not oversold.<\/p>\n

We hope the usage graph (along with our other honesty efforts<\/a>), helps offer a bit of necessary transparency into what we do and what makes us different. We don\u2019t want to copy the entrenched VPS providers\u2014we want to try different, exciting things, and the usage graph is just the first of many steps we\u2019re planning.<\/p>\n

We won\u2019t be able to dig into every<\/em> detail about our infrastructure, as we have plenty of proprietary code we can\u2019t share, but the top-down view is that we\u2019re running some sophisticated systems to ensure resource isolation between one server and its nearest neighbors. And, unlike one other VPS provider (no names, but have a bird, of all things, as a mascot) who just<\/em> figured out that Intel\u2019s Skylake architecture is a thing, we\u2019ve been building our host nodes with newer Intel Gold\/E5 CPUs for years.<\/p>\n

So, I\u2019m not going to argue that we\u2019re as fast<\/em> as dedicated hardware that cost 10X more, but we\u2019re certainly not oversold. As far as cheap<\/em> goes, the proof is in the pudding<\/a>\u2014we offer 10X more RAM for your dollar compared to that aforementioned-but-unnamed competitor.<\/p>\n

And as far as reliable<\/em> goes\u2014I guess you\u2019ll have to buy a server and see for yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We occasionally get accused of VPS overselling. That’s why we’re giving an industry-first look into our infrastructure\u2014come see the truth for yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":2425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-devops"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2423"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13296,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2423\/revisions\/13296"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssdnodes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}