How does cpanel-based web site hosting work?
For your information, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel-based site hosting offers on the present-day hosting market are furnished by a quite insignificant business segment (when it comes to yearly cash flow) named reseller hosting. Reseller web site hosting is a kind of a small-sized marketing niche, which generates a great amount of different web hosting trademarks, yet supplying absolutely the same solutions: mostly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Due to the fact that at least 98% of the web site hosting offers on the entire web site hosting market provide one and the same solution: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel web site hosting price tags are similar. Very much alike. Leaving for those who need a top web hosting service almost no other webspace hosting platform/web hosting CP option. So, there is simply one single fact: out of more than 200,000 web hosting brand names around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than two percent, remark that one...
200k "webspace hosting companies", all cPanel-based, yet diversely dubbed
The hosting "variety" and the webspace hosting "offerings" Google reveals to all of us boil down to just one and the very same solution: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different web space hosting trademarked names. Suppose you are simply a normal person who's not very well acquainted with (as most of us) with the web site creation procedures and the site hosting platforms, which actually power the respective domain names and online portals . Are you ready to make your web hosting choice? Is there any website hosting alternative you can settle on? Of course there is, today there are more than two hundred thousand website hosting providers in existence. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200,000+ unique hosting brands across the world will give you literally the same cPanel website hosting CP and platform, dubbed differently, with precisely the same price tags! WOW! That's how great the variety on today's website hosting marketplace is... Full stop.
The web hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple mathematics demonstrates that to pick a non-cPanel based web hosting corporation is a colossal stroke of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that a phenomenon like that will happen! Less than one in 50...
The positive and negative points of the cPanel-based website hosting solution
Let's not be cruel with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and presumably satisfied most webspace hosting market requirements. In short, cPanel can do the trick if you have only a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Negative Point Number One: A laughable domain name folder system
If you have 2 or more domains, though, be extremely cautious not to remove completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each subsequent hosted domain, 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 web server, because they all are created into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to delete the files of the add-on domain names, please. Observe for yourself how good cPanel's domain folder structure 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 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 bewildered? We surely are!
Negative Side No.2: The very same email folder configuration
The email folder configuration on the web hosting server is precisely the same as that of the domains... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin boys strongly strengthen their faith in God when tackling the mail folders on the email server, praying not to mess things up too irreparably.
Downside No.3: An utter lack of domain manipulation user interfaces
Do we need to point out the total shortage of a modern domain name management menu - a location where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or manage domains, modify domain names' Whois details, secure the Whois information, alter/create nameservers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not supply such a "modern" tool at all. That's an immense downside. An unjustifiable one, we wish to add...
Negative Point No.4: Many login locations (min 2, maximum three)
What about the need for an additional login to utilize the billing transaction, domain and technical support administration software? That's aside from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based website hosting service provider. Sometimes, on the basis of the invoicing transaction tool (especially invented for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel web hosting distributor is utilizing, the zealous customers can end up with two extra login places (1: the billing/domain name administration software solution; 2: the trouble ticket support system), winding up with an aggregate of three user login places (counting cPanel).
Weakness Number 5: More than one hundred and twenty website hosting CP sections to get familiar with... promptly
cPanel offers to your attention more than one hundred and twenty sections inside the webspace hosting Control Panel. It's a remarkable idea to become familiar with each and every one of them. And you'd better pick them up swiftly... That's excessively insolent on cPanel's side.
With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel web site hosting suppliers:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one as well...