Cheap Isn't Always Better When Selling Hosting

[Jason]

Buyers are usually very cynical. They see cheap as lacking quality, so perhaps a better idea is a free trail or a free hosting that can be upgraded.

 

[Tracy]

It is not necessarily that they "see" it as such. Many know it to be. It boils down to you have to have XXX amount of income to support the server those customers are hosted on and if you are only charging the low amount of YYY, you have to make up the lesser amount of YYY by increasing the number of clients you put on the machine, which generally results in overloading it as the vendor is not selling based upon a performance aspect but an income generated by low price aspect.
The used to be predominantly a shared hosting issue. But sadly it crept its way into the VPS providers also. It's more about trying to maximize income. Generally those hosting providers (shared and VPS) that do so have a high level of churn.

A classic case of overselling is Contabo. My XF development site is hosted on one of their VPS's (along with a few other low traffic sites). This VPS uses SSD (not NVMe) so it should be plenty fast.
The performance of that VPS compared to my Hetzner (which was also using SSD) was abysmal, especially in read/write speed for the storage. The Contabo one is turtle speed compared to the Hetzner VPS offering. Of course, the Hetzner VPS instance is about 3 times more expensive also and they don't tend to oversell their servers.
I got away from that now as I have a KimSufi dedicated server with SSD's and the read/write on it blows both the VPS's away.
The nice thing about the KimSufi server is it is not a high dollar one (paying less for it than I was for my Hetnzer VPS) but have 4 times the RAM and twice the storage. I would NOT recommend them for anyone that is not familiar with Linux server administration though as you are pretty much on your own unless it is hardware related.