From: Dave (djp_at_comm.it)
Date: Thu 31 Oct 2002 - 14:08:29 GMT
On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 16:52, Mefford, Aaron wrote:
> As to the specific post, I am not sure that the hard line of not overbooking
> is a good idea. While for many applications it would be a correct solution
> there are some where it will not. Every ISP over allocates their available
> resources. People do not care to pay for dedicated resources.
> Additionally, with most services now being offered via resellers, it seems
> unreasonable to not allow the reseller the same option. For instance, if I
> sell virtual private servers, and joe buys a VPS with the intention of
> selling individual web sites run within the VPS, I may or may not want to
> allow Joe to oversubscribe his disk space, possibly even on a per VPS basis.
If you allow overbooking of quota, then you could very easily do without
quota at all. I'll try to explain why:
Overbooking anything is a recipe for disaster which will happen sooner
or later. I'm not talking about quota alone. Overbooking network
connectivity or airplane tickets or disk space or any other limited
resource is like selling an item you don't actually own. It can look
appealing to sell 100gigabytes of space when you own only 50, but will
create you much more problems when every customer decides to use what
they're paying for. It is called bad business practice.
Believe, you don't want to sell 100gigs with 50% guarantee (it's a pure
joke).
Also, the point of using quota is to be able to delegate space
allocation to the system in an automatic and guaranteed way. If you
overbook, you'll have to look constantly on the disk space and allow for
downtime for disk upgrade when necessary.
Dave.