So many hosts oversell nowadays. It's crazy in the coconuts.
I should mention what overselling is, since I think it's sorta key to seperating good hosts from bad ones.
Overselling is basically giving you a great deal of diskspace and bandwith on the idea that you will never use most of it. This is based off of statistics that most websites only use about 10% of the disk space and bandwith allocated to them.
However, this is a gamble. A user could suddenly one day being using all of their bandwith. What happens then is they quickly drain all of the speed for every account on the server, and they are allowed to do so because they have such a copious amount of bandwith alloted to them. Things will look okay for this account, but every other person on the server (which can be sometimes as many as 250!) is suddenly getting download speeds below 50kb/s, and they're unable to even use their bandwith.
Of course, similar things may occur with disk space. A couple users may begin using most of their disk space. Then you go to upload a big file for a client, and you get an "out of disk space" error! Eventually the host shuts the server down and throws another drive in to eliminate the problem, but you just went through a ton of downtime through no fault of your own!
On top of this, if you yourself manage to use all of that bandwith or diskspace, you may incur incredibly high-priced overage charges, or have your site abruptly cancelled. Heck, I have seen companies cancel accounts simply because they used MOST, but not ALL of their space.
It's a gamble, as I said. Myself, I don't like taking the gamble. That's why I did the math when I bought the server. My server will never be oversold. I have set up the pricing so that when the server is finally full, I will be breaking even on the cost of the server. Yeah, I won't even be making money on it, even with the prices as low as they are now.
That's why hosts oversell, to make it seem like you are getting more, when in reality, they're just playing with you.
Of course, the price is very tempting, and thousands of people everyday use overselling hosts without issue. But in the end, it just comes down to "do you want to be played as part of the statistic"?
So yeah, that's my pitch to make my plan sound better :p
Also, my server is much more lax on many things, including billing. I am totally flexible on payments. I can take it in 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, etc etc etc however far in advance you want to pay. It's all done by Paypal which is secure of course. And paypal handles the recurring payments so no mistakes are made. (And even if they do, I will correct them!) Finally I can be flexible somewhat on missed payments and such. I do promise to keep the server online, and so far the server has an uptime of 165 days. (165 days of no downtime)
But most importantly, I will tell you straight up though. I am not a company. I am a single person running his own webserver to host his files. I sell off parts of the server's bandwith and space to help pay the bills. I am not in it for profit, just to help offset such a cost. I think it works out the best in the end for everyone. I am a very reasonable person, and I will be much more open to any ideas you may have or any changes you need made. (MZZT, for example, wanted Apache2. So I upgraded the system to Apache2.2. You won't see many hosts running that, especially with Cpanel)
Good luck
