What Exactly is cPanel Website Hosting?
For your info, it's good to be aware that the majority of the cPanel-based web hosting offers on the present-day website hosting market are provided by a quite unsubstantial marketing segment (as far as yearly cash flow is concerned) known as hosting reseller. Reseller hosting is a kind of a small-sized marketing niche, which generates a huge quantity of different web hosting brand names, yet providing the very same services: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because at least ninety eight percent of the web hosting offerings on the whole website hosting marketplace furnish exactly the same thing: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based web hosting prices are similar. Very similar. Giving those who need a top web hosting service virtually no other hosting platform/hosting Control Panel choice. Thus, there is just one single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand hosting brand names all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than two percent, note that one...
Two hundred thousand "web hosting providers", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely dubbed
The web hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offers" Google reveals to all of us come down to just one thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different hosting trademarked names. Assume you are just a regular bloke who's not well aware of (as the majority of us) with the site development processes and the web hosting platforms, which in fact power the various domains and sites. Are you ready to make your hosting decision? Is there any web hosting option you can pick? Of course there is, these days there are more than 200k website hosting providers in existence. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200,000+ different web hosting brands in the world will give you absolutely the same cPanel website hosting Control Panel and platform, branded in a different way, with literally the same price tags! WOW! That's how enormous the diversity on the present-day website hosting market is... Full stop.
The web hosting LOTTO we are all part of
Simple math shows that to chance upon a non-cPanel based web hosting company is an immense strike of luck. There is a less than one in 50 chance that a phenomenon like that will take place! Less than 1 in fifty...
The strong and weak sides of the cPanel web hosting solution
Let's not be cruel with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modern and perhaps met all website hosting industry requirements. To put it briefly, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only one domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Downside Number One: A laughable domain name folder system
If you have two or more domain names, however, be ultra careful not to remove 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 simple to erase on the server, because they all are placed into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain name is a folder located inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to erase the files of the add-on domain names, please. Discover for yourself how fantastic cPanel's domain folder configuration 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 getting baffled? We certainly are!
Problem Number 2: The very same electronic mail folder structure
The electronic mail folder configuration on the web hosting server is strictly the same as that of the domains... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The admin chaps strongly increase their belief in God when handling the mail folders on the e-mail server, hoping not to mess things up too severely.
Weakness Number Three: A thorough deficiency of domain administration sections
Do we have to point out the utter deficiency of a modern domain name manipulation platform - a location where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or manage domains, alter domain names' Whois info, shield the Whois details, alter/create name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not have such a "contemporary" user interface at all. That's an enormous weakness. An unjustifiable one, we would like to point out...
Disadvantage No.4: Numerous login locations (min two, max 3)
How about the need for an extra login to utilize the billing transaction, domain and tech support management platform? That's apart from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel web hosting company. Now and then, based on the invoicing system (especially made for cPanel only) the cPanel web hosting supplier is making use of, the devoted customers can wind up with 2 extra login places (1: the billing/domain management software; 2: the trouble ticket support GUI), ending up with a total of three user login places (counting cPanel).
Downside Number Five: 120+ web hosting CP sections to get acquainted with... promptly
cPanel offers to your attention more than a hundred and twenty menus inside the hosting Control Panel. It's a superb idea to memorize each of them. And you'd better get familiar with them briskly... That's excessively impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel web hosting firms:
As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one too...