How does cpanel website hosting function?
For your info, it's good to know that most of the cPanel-based web site hosting offers on today's hosting marketplace are provided by a very unsubstantial business segment (as far as yearly money flow is concerned) known as hosting reseller. Reseller hosting is a sort of a small-size business segment, which furnishes an enormous number of different web hosting brand names, yet offering literally the same thing: chiefly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98% of the web hosting offers on the entire web hosting market furnish the same service: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel web page hosting prices are identical. Very much alike. Leaving for those who demand a top web hosting service practically no other web space hosting platform/website hosting Control Panel option. So, there is merely a single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand web space hosting brands in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2%, remark that one...
200k "site hosting distributors", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely labeled
The website hosting "variety" and the site hosting "offers" Google reveals to us boil down to merely one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different website hosting brand names. Suppose you are only a normal person who's not very well familiar with (as most of us) with the website making procedures and the web page hosting platforms, which in fact power the various domains and web pages . Are you ready to make your hosting selection? Is there any web hosting option you can select? Sure there is, at present there are more than 200k site hosting distributors in existence. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200k+ different web site hosting brands in the world will give you absolutely the same cPanel webspace hosting Control Panel and platform, named differently, with precisely the same price tags! WOW! That's how big the diversity on the current site hosting marketplace is... Period.
The web page hosting LOTTERY we are all paricipating in
Simple arithmetic reveals that to stumble upon a non-cPanel based web hosting vendor is a mammoth stroke of fortune. There is a less than one in fifty chance that a thing like that will occur! Less than one in 50...
The positive and negative sides of the cPanel web page hosting solution
Let's not be severe with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and probably fulfilled all site hosting industry preconditions. To put it briefly, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domain names...
Negative Point Number One: A laughable domain name folder arrangement
If you have two or more domain names, though, be extra careful not to delete entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each subsequent hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are very simple to remove on the server, since they all are created into the root folder of the default domain, 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 try not to delete the files of the add-on domain names, please. Verify for yourself how excellent cPanel's domain name folder configuration is:
public_html (here my-default-domain.com is placed)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 name)
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 becoming bewildered? We certainly are!
Weak Side Number 2: The same email folder structure
The electronic mail folder structure on the server is absolutely the same as that of the domains... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The admin guys strongly reinforce their faith in God when managing the e-mail folders on the e-mail server, praying not to mess things up too severely.
Predicament Number 3: A total shortage of domain manipulation tools
Do we have to cite the sheer lack of a contemporary domain administration platform - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or administer domains, edit domains' Whois information, protect the Whois information, change/create name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not furnish such a "modern" tool at all. That's a major weakness. An unpardonable one, we want to add...
Drawback Number Four: Numerous user login places (min 2, maximum three)
What about the need for an additional login to avail of the billing transaction, domain and tech support management tool? That's aside from the cPanel login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel site hosting supplier. Sometimes, depending on the invoice transaction system (principally made for cPanel only) the cPanel web hosting distributor is utilizing, the zealous clients can wind up with two extra logins (1: the invoicing/domain administration software; 2: the ticket support software solution), winding up with a total of 3 login locations (including cPanel).
Downside Number Five: 120+ web hosting Control Panel departments to become familiar with... rapidly
cPanel presents to your attention more than 120 areas inside the web page hosting Control Panel. It's a superb idea to memorize each of them. And you'd better become familiar with them promptly... That's extremely impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based web page hosting providers:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one too...