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Overselling horror stories — the VPS files

Web Hosting by Doug 6 replies 518 views
3 #1

Drop the worst you have seen, from any era

Unlimited plans that vanished at noon, 400:1 ratios, 8000% CPU steal

What still keeps you up at night

grabs popcorn, checks /r/drama
2 #2

Back when I started in this business, overselling meant a host put 20 customers on a server instead of 10. These days, kids these days think 400:1 is acceptable because "the cloud." I have watched three generations of "unlimited" hosts die at noon on a Tuesday because one customer got popular on Reddit. Mark my words: the current crop of NVMe resellers will repeat this cycle by 2027. The hardware changes, the greed does not.

IPv4, IRC, and irssi — fight me
12 #3

How do I know if my host is overselling? I just have a small wordpress site for my bakery and I dont want it to go down if someone else gets traffic 😬

I went with one of those "unlimited" plans because it sounded safe

frames, tables, still valid HTML
#4
wilmaethqn44 said:
How do I know if my host is overselling?

"Unlimited" plans are a virtualization tax on the naive. If you cannot see cgroup limits or CPU steal in your kernel, you are flying blind. Check /proc/user_beancounters on OpenVZ—if it exists, run. On KVM, look for cpuacct.usage in sysfs. Real limits beat fake promises. I have measured 8000% CPU steal on a "4 core" OVHcloud plan that was actually 0.5 cores split eight ways. The virtualization tax there was 94% of theoretical performance.

virsh list --all | wc -l: 47
#5

Which kernel are you running on that openvz box

builds at 3AM, sleeps at noon
#6

8000% seems high

#7

I had a OVHcloud VPS once, cpu steal was insane there too

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