cPanel Website Hosting Unveiled
For your information, it's good to know that most of the cPanel hosting offers on the present-day web hosting market are generated by a quite insubstantial marketing segment (as far as annual cash flow is concerned) dubbed hosting reseller. Reseller web hosting is a sort of a small-scale business segment, which generates a huge number of different web hosting trademarks, yet providing one and the same services: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98% of the website hosting offers on the entire web hosting marketplace offer absolutely the same service: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting price tags are identical. Very similar. Leaving for those who demand a top web hosting service practically no other web hosting platform/web hosting CP choice. So, there is only one single fact: out of more than 200,000 website hosting trademarks all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2 percent, mark that one...
200k "hosting providers", all cPanel-based, yet differently dubbed
The hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offerings" Google presents to all of us boil down to merely one and the same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different website hosting brand names. Imagine you are simply an ordinary fellow who's not well aware of (as the majority of us) with the web site creation procedures and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the individual domains and web pages. Are you prepared to make your hosting selection? Is there any website hosting alternative you can select? Of course there is, now there are more than 200,000 website hosting providers in existence. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these 200k+ different web hosting brands worldwide will give you strictly the same cPanel web hosting Control Panel and platform, named in a different way, with the very same price tags! WOW! That's how great the diversity on today's hosting market is... Period.
The hosting LOTTO we are all part of
Simple math demonstrates that to stumble upon a non-cPanel based web hosting vendor is an immense strike of luck. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that something like that will occur! Less than one in fifty...
The pluses and minuses of the cPanel-based hosting solution
Let's not be severe with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and perhaps answered all hosting business requirements. In short, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have only one domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Weakness Number One: A dumb domain name folder structure
If you have two or more domain names, though, be ultra attentive not to erase entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each new hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domain names are very simple to delete on the web server, because they all are situated into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the very famous 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 delete the files of the add-on domain names, please. Discover for yourself how good cPanel's domain name 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)
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 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)
Are you growing puzzled? We definitely are!
Shortcoming No.2: The same electronic mail folder arrangement
The mail folder configuration on the web server is literally the same as that of the domains... Making the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin guys firmly reinforce their faith in God when dealing with the e-mail folders on the e-mail server, hoping not to mess things up too seriously.
Disadvantage Number 3: A total deficiency of domain name management menus
Do we have to refer to the absolute lack of a modern domain name manipulation menu - a location where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or administer domain names, change domains' Whois info, shield the Whois info, modify/set up name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not supply such a "contemporary" section at all. That's a great inconvenience. An unforgivable one, we would like to point out...
Downside Number Four: Numerous user login locations (min two, maximum 3)
What about the demand for an extra login to avail of the invoicing, domain name and tech support administration GUI? That's apart from the cPanel login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel-based hosting provider. Now and then, based on the invoicing transaction platform (especially conceived for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting vendor is availing of, the keen users can wind up with two extra login locations (1: the invoicing/domain name administration platform; 2: the ticket support GUI), ending up with an aggregate of three login locations (counting cPanel).
Weak Point No.5: 120+ web hosting Control Panel areas to pick up... swiftly
cPanel presents for your consideration more than 120 menus inside the web hosting Control Panel. It's a terrific idea to memorize each of them. And you'd better pick them up swiftly... That's extremely impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based hosting distributors:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one as well...