How cPanel Website Hosting Functions
For your info, it's useful to be aware that the majority of the cPanel-based Website Hosting offers on the contemporary web hosting market are provided by a quite unsubstantial business segment (as far as annual capital flow is concerned) called hosting reseller. Reseller web hosting is a sort of a small-scale marketing segment, which furnishes a big amount of different web hosting trademarks, yet providing exactly the same thing: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98% of the web hosting offerings on the whole hosting marketplace furnish strictly the same service: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel Website Hosting prices are similar. Quite identical. Leaving for those who need a top web hosting service virtually no other web hosting platform/hosting Control Panel option. So, there is only one single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand website hosting trademarks all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2, remark that one...
Two hundred thousand "Website Hosting corporations", all cPanel-based, yet differently branded
The Website Hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offers" Google presents to us come down to just one thing: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different hosting trademarked names. Assume you are merely a regular guy who's not well aware of (as the majority of us) with the website creation procedures and the website hosting platforms, which in fact power the respective domains and web pages. Are you prepared to make your web hosting choice? Is there any website hosting variant you can settle on? Sure there is, right now there are more than 200k web hosting service providers in existence. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200,000+ different hosting brands across the world will offer you precisely the same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, labeled in a different way, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how great the diversity on today's web hosting marketplace is... Full stop.
The Website Hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple math shows that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting vendor is a mammoth stroke of luck. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that a phenomenon like that will happen! Less than one in 50...
The pluses and minuses of the cPanel Website Hosting solution
Let's not be fierce with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modern and presumably covered most web hosting industry demands. In brief, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only one single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Shortcoming Number 1: A laughable domain name folder structure
If you have two or more domain names, however, be extremely watchful not to remove fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each new hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domains are very simple to remove on the hosting server, since they all are created into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder located inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domain names, please. Discover for yourself how fantastic cPanel's domain name folder configuration is:
public_html (here my-default-domain.com is situated)public_html/my-family (a folder part of my-default-domain.com)
public_html/my-second-domain.com (an add-on domain)
public_html/my-second-wife (a folder part of my-default-domain.com)
public_html/my-second-wife.net (an add-on domain)
public_html/my-third-domain.com (an add-on domain name)
public_html/my-third-wife (a folder part of my-default-domain.com)
public_html/my-third-wife.net (an add-on domain)
public_html/rebeka (a folder part of my-default-domain.com)
public_html/rebeka.my-third-wife.net (a sub-domain of an add-on domain name)
Are you getting baffled? We undoubtedly are!
Disadvantage No.2: The very same mail folder system
The e-mail folder structure on the server is absolutely the same as that of the domains... Repeating the very same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin chaps strongly enhance their belief in God when tackling the mail folders on the email server, praying not to muck things up too gravely.
Predicament Number Three: A thorough shortage of domain name management sections
Do we need to cite the utter lack of a contemporary domain management interface - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or administer domains, edit domains' Whois information, secure the Whois info, change/set up name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not furnish such a "contemporary" GUI at all. That's a huge problem. An unpardonable one, we wish to add...
Downside Number 4: Multiple login locations (minimum 2, max three)
How about the need for an extra login to avail of the billing, domain and technical support administration section? That's beside the cPanel account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel-based Website Hosting corporation. At times, on the basis of the invoicing transaction tool (particularly devised for cPanel only) the cPanel Website Hosting provider is availing of, the earnest clients can end up with two additional logins (1: the billing/domain management user interface; 2: the trouble ticket support tool), ending up with a total of three login places (including cPanel).
Inconvenience No.5: More than one hundred and twenty web hosting Control Panel departments to learn... promptly
cPanel presents for your consideration more than one hundred and twenty menus inside the website hosting CP. It's a terrific idea to grasp each and every one of them. And you'd better get acquainted with them quickly... That's extremely impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel Website Hosting providers:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one too...