What Exactly is cPanel Website Hosting?
For your info, it's good to be aware that most of the cPanel-based website hosting offerings on the contemporary website hosting marketplace are supplied by a quite unsubstantial marketing niche (when it comes to annual capital flow) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a kind of a small-size marketing segment, which provides a huge quantity of different web hosting trademarks, yet supplying strictly the same services: mainly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because at least ninety eight percent of the website hosting offerings on the entire web hosting marketplace supply literally the same solution: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based website hosting prices are alike. Quite identical. Leaving for those who require a top web hosting service virtually no other website hosting platform/website hosting Control Panel alternative. So, there is just one single fact: out of more than 200k website hosting brand names around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2%, mark that one...
200k "website hosting companies", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly dubbed
The website hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offers" Google presents to all of us come down to just one solution: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different web hosting brand names. Suppose you are only an ordinary guy who's not very familiar with (as most of us) with the site development procedures and the website hosting platforms, which in fact power the individual domain names and web sites. Are you prepared to make your hosting decision? Is there any website hosting option you can select? Sure there is, nowadays there are more than two hundred thousand website hosting firms out there. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these more than two hundred thousand unique website hosting brand names across the world will offer you exactly the same cPanel hosting CP and platform, labeled differently, with absolutely the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the assortment on today's web hosting market is... Full stop.
The website hosting LOTTO we are all participating in
Simple mathematics shows that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting firm is a great strike of luck. There is a less than one in 50 chance that a phenomenon like that will happen! Less than 1 in fifty...
The upsides and downsides of the cPanel website hosting solution
Let's not be relentless with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and perhaps answered most website hosting industry prerequisites. To put it briefly, cPanel can do the trick if you have only one domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Problem No.1: A foolish domain name folder system
If you have two or more domain names, though, be very attentive not to delete completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each new 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 web server, since they all are placed into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very famous public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domain names, please. See for yourself how fabulous cPanel's domain folder setup 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 nonplussed? We undeniably are!
Negative Sign Number 2: The same email folder structure
The email folder arrangement on the hosting server is absolutely the same as that of the domains... Making the same error twice?!? The admin boys firmly reinforce their faith in God when coping with the email folders on the email server, praying not to mess things up too seriously.
Inconvenience Number 3: An entire absence of domain administration menus
Do we need to bring up the utter shortage of a contemporary domain administration interface - a location where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or administer domain names, change domains' Whois information, secure the Whois information, alter/set up name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not incorporate such a "modern" interface at all. That's a considerable downside. An unjustifiable one, we want to point out...
Drawback Number Four: Numerous user login places (min 2, max 3)
What about the demand for an extra login to use the billing, domain and technical support management user interface? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel website hosting vendor. Now and then, based on the billing transaction platform (especially built for cPanel solely) the cPanel website hosting provider is making use of, the ardent users can wind up with two extra login places (1: the invoice transaction/domain administration tool; 2: the ticket support interface), winding up with an aggregate of 3 user login locations (including cPanel).
Downside Number 5: 120+ web hosting CP departments to pick up... fast
cPanel offers for your consideration more than a hundred and twenty menus inside the web hosting Control Panel. It's a superb idea to become familiar with each one of them. And you'd better grasp them rapidly... That's excessively insolent on cPanel's side.
With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel website hosting service providers:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one too...