What Actually is cPanel Hosting?
For your information, it's useful to know that the majority of the cPanel-based website hosting offerings on today's website hosting marketplace are generated by a quite insignificant marketing segment (when it comes to annual money flow) called reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a kind of a small-size business niche, which provides a huge number of different web hosting brands, yet providing literally the same services: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Due to the fact that at least 98% of the web hosting offerings on the whole website hosting market offer one and the same service: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel website hosting price tags are similar. Quite identical. Leaving for those in need of a top web hosting service almost no other website hosting platform/CP choice. So, there is simply one single fact: out of more than 200k hosting trademarks in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than two percent, mark that one...
Two hundred thousand "website hosting distributors", all cPanel-based, yet differently named
The website hosting "diversity" and the web hosting "offers" Google shows to all of us boil down to merely one thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different web hosting brand names. Suppose you are only a regular guy who's not very well acquainted with (as most of us) with the web page making processes and the website hosting platforms, which in fact power the respective domain names and websites. Are you prepared to make your hosting selection? Is there any hosting variant you can settle on? Sure there is, at the moment there are more than two hundred thousand website hosting vendors in existence. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ unique web hosting brand names around the world will offer you the very same cPanel website hosting Control Panel and platform, branded differently, with literally the same price tags! WOW! That's how vast the variety on the present-day website hosting market is... Period.
The website hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple arithmetic reveals that to run into a non-cPanel based web hosting supplier is a huge stroke of fortune. There is a less than one in fifty chance that a phenomenon like that will happen! Less than 1 in 50...
The positive and negative aspects of the cPanel-based website hosting solution
Let's not be fierce with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and probably answered all web hosting industry prerequisites. To cut a long story short, cPanel can do the trick if you have just one single domain to host. But, if you have more domain names...
Negative Sign Number One: A ludicrous domain folder setup
If you have two or more domain names, though, be extra watchful not to remove fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will dub each next hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domain names are very easy to delete on the hosting server, because they all are created into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder located inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to delete the files of the add-on domains, please. Check for yourself how good 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 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 name)
Are you growing bewildered? We positively are!
Inconvenience Number 2: The very same mail folder arrangement
The email folder arrangement on the web server is strictly the same as that of the domains... Making the same error twice?!? The sysadmin chaps firmly strengthen their belief in God when dealing with the electronic mail folders on the e-mail server, hoping not to muck things up too seriously.
Problem Number Three: An absolute lack of domain name manipulation GUIs
Do we have to refer to the sheer lack of a modern domain management platform - a place where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or manage domain names, edit domains' Whois information, protect the Whois info, edit/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not furnish such a "contemporary" section at all. That's a mammoth downside. An unforgivable one, we would like to add...
Shortcoming No.4: Numerous user login places (minimum 2, maximum three)
How about the necessity for an extra login to make use of the invoicing, domain and tech support administration menu? That's apart from the cPanel login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel-based website hosting distributor. Sometimes, on the basis of the invoicing transaction platform (particularly devised for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel website hosting distributor is availing of, the eager clients can end up with 2 additional logins (1: the invoicing/domain administration software solution; 2: the trouble ticket support system), ending up with a total of three user login locations (including cPanel).
Negative Sign Number Five: More than 120 Control Panel sections to get to know... briskly
cPanel presents to your attention more than one hundred and twenty sections inside the Control Panel. It's a fantastic idea to become familiar with each of them. And you'd better get acquainted with them swiftly... That's way too arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel website hosting providers:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one too...