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Overselling is a term used in web hosting to describe a situation in which a company provides hosting plans that are unsustainable if every of its customers uses the full extent of them. The term is usually referred to the usage of webspace and bandwidth.

Due to the fact that a majority of people do not use any significant portion of their allocated share, this practice is used in a majority of webhosts with little ill-effect. However, in some cases, the provider may oversell to an extent at which the users cannot use all of their space, because too many people are using a good amount of their resources.

Overselling can in many cases label the hosting services "junk", poor quality, and nothing more than a false marketing strategy. If a customer is only serving a few static HTML pages there most likely will be no effect, but for those who wish to run a high-traffic, professional, or business website an oversold hosting account can be detrimental.

The illusion is that websites need 200GB storage, when realistically most websites can function using well under 100MB disk space. More than just disk space and bandwidth should be considered. CPU usage is also a common issue that growing website administrators face. In a shared hosting environment there are restrictions placed on the users to prevent hogging of server resources. There are far more restrictions for a customer that shares a server with 600 other accounts than one who shares a server with 100-300 others. Hence "You get what you pay for".

Being educated and informed to the actual amount of resources one's website(s) require before choosing a host is best practice and advised. In reality, one who may actually require what's offered by overselling hosts would be advised to seek a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Server.

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