How Does cPanel Web Hosting Function?
For your information, it's useful to be aware that most of the cPanel-based web hosting offerings on the present-day web hosting market are generated by a quite insignificant marketing segment (when it comes to annual money flow) known as reseller hosting. Reseller hosting is a kind of a small-scale marketing niche, which supplies a huge quantity of different web hosting brands, yet supplying one and the same solutions: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because at least 98% of the website hosting offerings on the entire web hosting market furnish the very same solution: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based web hosting price tags are similar. Very similar. Leaving for those in need of a top web hosting service virtually no other web hosting platform/Control Panel alternative. Thus, there is just one single fact: out of more than 200,000 website hosting trademarks in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than two percent, mind that one...
Two hundred thousand "web hosting companies", all cPanel-based, yet differently labeled
The web hosting "diversity" and the website hosting "offers" Google presents to us come down to just one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different web hosting trademarked names. Suppose you are only an ordinary chap who's not very well acquainted with (as most of us) with the website making processes and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the different domain names and sites. Are you prepared to make your web hosting pick? Is there any website hosting option you can decide upon? Sure there is, at the moment there are more than two hundred thousand hosting vendors in existence. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200,000+ different website hosting brands across the world will give you the very same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, named differently, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how large the variety on the contemporary web hosting marketplace is... Full stop.
The web hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple arithmetic shows that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting company is a huge stroke of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that a thing like that will occur! Less than one in fifty...
The advantages and disadvantages of the cPanel-based web hosting solution
Let's not be relentless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and perhaps met most web hosting industry requirements. To put it briefly, cPanel can do the job for you if you have just a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Negative Point Number One: A moronic domain name folder system
If you have 2 or more domains, though, be ultra careful not to erase entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will dub each new hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are quite simple to remove on the server, since they all are situated into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domain names, please. Verify for yourself how wonderful cPanel's domain name folder arrangement 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)
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 perplexed? We unquestionably are!
Weakness Number Two: The very same mail folder system
The mail folder structure on the web server is strictly the same as that of the domain names... Making the very same error twice?!? The admin chums strongly strengthen their belief in God when tackling the e-mail folders on the electronic mail server, praying not to screw things up too badly.
Negative Aspect No.3: A complete shortage of domain manipulation sections
Do we have to point out the total absence of a contemporary domain management platform - a place where you can: register/move/renew/park or manage domain names, modify domain names' Whois info, protect the Whois details, modify/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not include such a "contemporary" section at all. That's a colossal weakness. An unpardonable one, we would like to point out...
Downside Number 4: Numerous user login locations (min two, max three)
What about the demand for an extra login to avail of the invoice transaction, domain name and tech support management platform? That's beside the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel web hosting service provider. Occasionally, on the basis of the billing system (principally made for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel web hosting distributor is utilizing, the avid customers can wind up with two extra login locations (1: the invoice transaction/domain name management menu; 2: the trouble ticket support GUI), ending up with an aggregate of three user login places (including cPanel).
Weak Point Number 5: 120+ web hosting CP areas to become acquainted with... swiftly
cPanel offers for your consideration 120+ areas inside the web hosting Control Panel. It's a glorious idea to grasp each of them. And you'd better grasp them swiftly... That's excessively insolent on cPanel's side.
With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based web hosting companies:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Note that one as well...