Overselling

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Overselling is a term used in the web hosting industry to describe a situation in which a company provides hosting plans that are unsustainable if every one of its customers uses the full extent of services advertised. The term is usually referred to the web space and bandwidth transfer allowance.
This practice usually incurs little ill-effect since most customers do not use any significant portion of their allocated share. If a customer has a small, low-traffic site serving static HTML pages, few resources will be used. If a customer wishes to run a high-traffic, professional, or business website an oversold hosting account can be detrimental. In these cases, a virtual private server or dedicated server is a preferred option.
Examples
Web hosting
Web hosting companies may provide more disk space and bandwidth than they expect customers to use.
Webmail
Gmail initially provided 1GB of storage space for all users. This was a lot higher than other webmail services at the time. Since then, TechCrunch reported that Yahoo Mail had announced unlimited storage, which would be unsustainable if every user pushed the limits.