How cPanel Hosting Works
For your info, it's good to be aware that most of the cPanel-based hosting offers on the current website hosting market are supplied by a quite insubstantial business niche (when it comes to annual capital flow) known as reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a sort of a small-size business segment, which furnishes a huge amount of different web hosting brand names, yet providing strictly the same thing: chiefly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98 percent of the website hosting offerings on the entire website hosting marketplace provide one and the same service: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting prices are alike. Very much alike. Giving those who need a top web hosting service almost no other hosting platform/website hosting CP choice. So, there is merely one single fact: out of more than 200k web hosting brand names worldwide, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2%, note that one...
200,000 "hosting providers", all cPanel-based, yet diversely labeled
The hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offerings" Google presents to us come down to just one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different website hosting brand names. Assume you are simply a regular chap who's not very well familiar with (as most of us) with the web site making procedures and the web 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 select? Of course there is, right now there are more than two hundred thousand hosting vendors in existence. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these more than two hundred thousand unique web hosting brands in the world will offer you strictly the same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, branded in a different way, with precisely the same price tags! WOW! That's how immense the diversity on today's web hosting marketplace is... Period.
The hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple mathematics demonstrates that to chance upon a non-cPanel based web hosting corporation is a huge strike of luck. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that a phenomenon like that will occur! Less than one in fifty...
The pros and cons of the cPanel-based hosting solution
Let's not be pitiless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and perhaps covered most web hosting business prerequisites. To cut a long story short, cPanel can do the job for you if you have just a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Problem Number 1: An idiotic domain folder configuration
If you have 2 or more domain names, though, be extra attentive not to remove entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each new hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are quite simple to remove on the server, because they all are located into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite 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 attempt not to erase the files of the add-on domains, please. See for yourself how excellent cPanel's domain folder structure is:
public_html (here my-default-domain.com is located)public_html/my-family (a folder part of my-default-domain.com)
public_html/my-second-domain.com (an add-on domain name)
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 becoming puzzled? We surely are!
Drawback Number Two: The same e-mail folder arrangement
The email folder arrangement on the web hosting server is precisely the same as that of the domains... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The admin chaps strongly increase their belief in God when dealing with the email folders on the electronic mail server, hoping not to mess things up too gravely.
Weakness No.3: A sheer lack of domain name manipulation sections
Do we need to point out the thorough deficiency of a contemporary domain name manipulation GUI - a location where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or administer domain names, edit domains' Whois information, shield the Whois info, edit/create name servers (DNS) and DNS records? cPanel does not contain such a "modern" menu at all. That's a vast problem. An unpardonable one, we would like to add...
Weak Side Number 4: Many login places (min 2, maximum 3)
What about the necessity for an extra login to avail of the invoicing transaction, domain and tech support administration software platform? That's beside the cPanel account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel hosting provider. Sometimes, on the basis of the invoice transaction system (particularly made for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting corporation is using, the zealous customers can end up with two additional login places (1: the invoice transaction/domain management user interface; 2: the trouble ticket support GUI), ending up with an aggregate of 3 login locations (counting cPanel).
Negative Side Number Five: More than 120 web hosting Control Panel areas to become acquainted with... swiftly
cPanel offers to your attention more than one hundred and twenty sections inside the CP. It's a fine idea to get acquainted with each one of them. And you'd better memorize them quickly... That's very arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due recognition, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting firms:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one as well...