I hate hosts that oversell, because you never know what you are actually getting
Is there a way of finding out the real amount of resources you are getting. is a company legally obliged to tell you if you ask them?
No, i don't think theres anyway of telling what you're getting. I suppose if you asked them they would have to tell you or face you giving them a bad reputation.
And yes, i hate overselling, though it is surprisingly effective in getting customers (not that i have ever ran a hosting company)
Overselling, is overselling. Most hosts do it, and it works pretty good.
People love to see the big numbers like 10000000gb of space, and 1000000000000gb of bw.
They flock to those things, and they fall right into the hosting companies trap. I try not to do this in my free hosting site, but it's impossible to avoid. If you be real, and offer small accounts, people will not be attracted to it. You might feel bad about it, but if you want to be on top of the hosting game, it's something you need to think about.
Overselling is common. However it's a fools plan to use a hosts BW to it's max. I would say 10-50% is probably the most you can count on for usage. Most hosts also have hidden terms about CPU cycles or possibly strict mysql queries per hour. I know servage limits it to 10,000 queries per database per hour. I have accidentally reached that a couple times by using the admincp rebuild threads function. If you have thousands of posts you are creating thousands of queries in seconds.
If you plan to use more than 200-300GB of bandwidth..it's time for VPS or dedicated. I prefer colo myself.