How cPanel Hosting Functions
For your information, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel-based Hosting offers on today's web hosting marketplace are provided by a quite inconsiderable marketing segment (when it comes to yearly money flow) named hosting reseller. Reseller web hosting is a sort of a small-sized marketing niche, which provides an enormous quantity of different web hosting trademarks, yet offering exactly the same services: chiefly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because at least 98% of the website hosting offers on the whole web hosting market furnish one and the very same service: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel Hosting price tags are alike. Quite similar. Giving those who demand a top web hosting service almost no other website hosting platform/hosting CP alternative. So, there is only a single fact: out of more than 200k website hosting trademarks around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than 2 percent, mind that one...
200,000 "Hosting suppliers", all cPanel-based, yet diversely labeled
The Hosting "diversity" 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 web hosting brand names. Imagine you are only a regular guy who's not well aware of (as the majority of us) with the site making procedures and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the individual domain names and web portals. Are you prepared to make your web hosting decision? Is there any web hosting alternative you can select? Sure there is, at the moment there are more than 200,000 web hosting distributors out there. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these more than two hundred thousand unique web hosting brands all over the world will give you the very same cPanel website hosting Control Panel and platform, named differently, with the very same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the variety on today's hosting market is... Full stop.
The Hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in
Simple math reveals that to select a non-cPanel based web hosting firm is a gigantic strike of luck. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that an event like that will happen! Less than one in fifty...
The positive and negative sides of the cPanel-based Hosting solution
Let's not be unfair with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and probably fulfilled most web hosting market requirements. In short, cPanel can do the trick if you have just one domain to host. But, if you have more domain names...
Weakness Number One: A stupid domain folder configuration
If you have 2 or more domains, however, be very attentive not to remove entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each next hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are very easy to erase on the web server, because they all are placed into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very popular 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 domains, please. Verify for yourself how great 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 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)
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 disorientated? We undeniably are!
Negative Sign No.2: The same mail folder arrangement
The email folder structure on the server is absolutely the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin guys firmly fortify their faith in God when tackling the e-mail folders on the mail server, hoping not to screw things up too seriously.
Shortcoming No.3: A sheer lack of domain management menus
Do we need to bring up the complete absence of a contemporary domain name management GUI - a location where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or administer domain names, modify domains' Whois info, protect the Whois info, edit/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not have such a "contemporary" menu at all. That's an immense drawback. An inexcusable one, we wish to add...
Weak Point No.4: Numerous login places (min two, maximum three)
How about the need for an additional login to use the billing, domain and tech support management system? That's beside the cPanel account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based Hosting corporation. At times, based on the invoice transaction system (especially intended for cPanel solely) the cPanel Hosting corporation is using, the devoted customers can end up with 2 additional login locations (1: the invoicing transaction/domain name management menu; 2: the trouble ticket support system), ending up with a total of 3 login locations (counting cPanel).
Negative Point No.5: 120+ website hosting Control Panel departments to memorize... promptly
cPanel offers to your attention more than 120 areas inside the web hosting CP. It's a superb idea to memorize each of them. And you'd better grasp them quickly... That's excessively insolent on cPanel's side.
With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based Hosting providers:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one as well...