How Does cPanel Website Hosting Function?
For your info, it's good to be aware that most of the cPanel-based hosting offers on the contemporary website hosting market are generated by a quite insignificant business niche (when it comes to yearly money flow) dubbed hosting reseller. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small marketing niche, which supplies a vast quantity of different web hosting brand names, yet supplying strictly the same thing: mainly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Due to the fact that at least 98 percent of the website hosting offers on the entire web hosting market supply precisely the same solution: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel hosting price tags are alike. Very much alike. Leaving for those who demand a top web hosting service practically no other website hosting platform/Control Panel choice. Thus, there is just one fact: out of more than 200k web hosting brand names all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than 2 percent, remark that one...
200,000 "hosting corporations", all cPanel-based, yet diversely dubbed
The hosting "diversity" and the website hosting "offerings" Google shows to us boil down to merely one thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different web hosting brand names. Imagine you are simply a normal person who's not very familiar with (as most of us) with the website making processes and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the separate domain names and web portals. Are you ready to make your web hosting choice? Is there any web hosting option you can settle on? Of course there is, at the moment there are more than 200,000 web hosting vendors in existence. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200k+ unique website hosting brand names across the world will offer you absolutely the same cPanel website hosting Control Panel and platform, named differently, with absolutely the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the diversity on today's web hosting market is... Period.
The hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in
Simple mathematics reveals that to pick a non-cPanel based web hosting corporation is a mammoth strike of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that a thing like that will happen! Less than 1 in 50...
The positive and negative sides of the cPanel-based hosting solution
Let's not be severe with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and possibly fulfilled all web hosting market requirements. To cut a long story short, cPanel can do the trick if you have only one single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Problem Number One: A foolish domain folder configuration
If you have 2 or more domains, however, be extremely cautious not to erase completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each next hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domain names are quite easy to erase on the server, because they all are created into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite popular public_html folder. Each add-on domain name is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to erase the files of the add-on domains, please. Determine for yourself how fabulous cPanel's domain folder setup 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)
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 nonplussed? We undoubtedly are!
Weak Point No.2: The very same email folder arrangement
The mail folder structure on the web hosting server is strictly the same as that of the domains... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The admin blokes strongly enhance their faith in God when handling the e-mail folders on the email server, hoping not to muck things up too irreparably.
Predicament Number Three: A sheer lack of domain name administration sections
Do we need to mention the complete shortage of a contemporary domain name manipulation interface - a place where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or administer domain names, edit domain names' Whois info, secure the Whois info, edit/set up name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not supply such a "contemporary" interface at all. That's a major shortcoming. An unpardonable one, we wish to point out...
Negative Sign Number Four: Numerous login locations (min two, maximum three)
How about the necessity for an additional login to avail of the billing, domain name and tech support management menu? That's apart from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel hosting service provider. Occasionally, based on the invoicing transaction platform (principally tailored for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting vendor is availing of, the enthusiastic customers can wind up with two extra login places (1: the invoicing transaction/domain management tool; 2: the ticket support user interface), ending up with an aggregate of 3 login places (counting cPanel).
Drawback No.5: More than 120 Control Panel areas to pick up... fast
cPanel presents to your attention more than a hundred and twenty areas inside the web hosting CP. It's a terrific idea to become familiar with each of them. And you'd better grasp them rapidly... That's inordinately impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based hosting distributors:
As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Note that one too...