How Does cPanel Hosting Function?
For your information, it's good to know that the majority of the cPanel-based website hosting offers on today's hosting marketplace are provided by a quite inconsiderable marketing segment (as far as annual capital flow is concerned) named hosting reseller. Reseller web hosting is a sort of a small-size business niche, which supplies a big quantity of different web hosting brands, yet furnishing precisely the same services: mainly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because at least 98% of the web hosting offerings on the entire website hosting market furnish exactly the same thing: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel-based website hosting prices are identical. Quite identical. Giving those in need of a top web hosting service practically no other web hosting platform/Control Panel option. Thus, there is simply a single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand web hosting trademarks in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2 percent, note that one...
Two hundred thousand "website hosting vendors", all cPanel-based, yet differently dubbed
The website hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offerings" Google shows to all of us come down to merely one and the same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different web hosting brand names. Suppose you are simply an average guy who's not very well acquainted with (as most of us) with the web site creation processes and the hosting platforms, which in fact power the different domains and online portals. Are you prepared to make your hosting decision? Is there any website hosting variant you can pick? Sure there is, these days there are more than 200,000 web hosting companies out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these 200k+ different web hosting brand names all over the world will offer you absolutely the same cPanel web hosting Control Panel and platform, named in a different way, with exactly the same price tags! WOW! That's how big the variety on the present-day web hosting market is... Period.
The website hosting LOTTO we are all participating in
Simple math demonstrates that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting corporation is a colossal stroke of luck. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that an event like that will occur! Less than one in 50...
The positive and negative aspects of the cPanel website hosting solution
Let's not be severe with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and perhaps fulfilled all web hosting market requirements. In brief, cPanel can do the trick if you have only a single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Negative Side No.1: A stupid domain folder arrangement
If you have two or more domains, though, be very careful not to delete fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will dub each next hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domain names are quite easy to remove on the web server, since they all are placed into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the very famous public_html folder. Each add-on domain name is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to delete the files of the add-on domain names, please. Determine for yourself how amazing cPanel's domain name folder system 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 name)
public_html/my-third-domain.com (an add-on domain)
public_html/my-third-wife (a folder part of my-default-domain.com)
public_html/my-third-wife.net (an add-on domain name)
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 perplexed? We undoubtedly are!
Negative Point No.2: The same mail folder arrangement
The e-mail folder arrangement on the hosting server is exactly the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the same error twice?!? The admin chaps firmly reinforce their faith in God when tackling the email folders on the mail server, hoping not to bungle things up too badly.
Drawback Number Three: An utter lack of domain name management menus
Do we need to point out the sheer shortage of a modern domain name management GUI - a location where you can: register/move/renew/park or manage domains, alter domain names' Whois information, secure the Whois info, alter/create name servers (DNS) and DNS records? cPanel does not include such a "contemporary" user interface at all. That's a vast inconvenience. An unforgivable one, we want to add...
Drawback Number Four: Many login places (min 2, maximum 3)
What about the need for another login to avail of the billing, domain name and technical support management GUI? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based website hosting supplier. Sometimes, on the basis of the billing transaction platform (especially invented for cPanel only) the cPanel website hosting firm is availing of, the keen clients can end up with 2 additional logins (1: the invoicing/domain management tool; 2: the ticket support software), ending up with a total of three login locations (counting cPanel).
Disadvantage Number Five: More than a hundred and twenty web hosting Control Panel areas to memorize... briskly
cPanel presents for your consideration more than 120 menus inside the web hosting CP. It's a remarkable idea to become familiar with each and every one of them. And you'd better memorize them promptly... That's inordinately impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based website hosting companies:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one too...