Explanation of cPanel Hosting
For your information, it's good to be aware that most of the cPanel hosting offers on the contemporary website hosting marketplace are supplied by a quite inconsiderable marketing niche (when it comes to annual capital flow) dubbed hosting reseller. Reseller web hosting is a type of a small-size marketing niche, which furnishes a huge amount of different web hosting brand names, yet offering the very 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 web hosting offerings on the entire web hosting marketplace supply exactly the same thing: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel hosting price tags are alike. Very similar. Giving those who demand a top web hosting service almost no other web hosting platform/website hosting CP alternative. So, there is just a single fact: out of more than 200,000 web hosting brands in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2%, mind that one...
Two hundred thousand "hosting firms", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely labeled
The hosting "diversity" and the web hosting "offers" Google reveals to us come down to just one and the very same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different hosting brand names. Assume you are just an ordinary fellow who's not very well acquainted with (as the majority of us) with the web page making processes and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the respective domain names and online portals. Are you prepared to make your hosting choice? Is there any web hosting variant you can settle on? Of course there is, right now there are more than 200k hosting vendors out there. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these more than two hundred thousand unique web hosting brands all over the world will offer you strictly the same cPanel website hosting Control Panel and platform, named in a different way, with literally the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the assortment on the contemporary website hosting market is... Period.
The hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple arithmetic shows that to come across a non-cPanel based web hosting distributor is a gigantic stroke of fortune. There is a less than one in 50 chance that something like that will occur! Less than 1 in 50...
The upsides and downsides of the cPanel hosting solution
Let's not be fierce with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and perhaps satisfied most web hosting business requirements. To put it briefly, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have just one single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Disadvantage Number 1: A moronic domain name folder structure
If you have 2 or more domain names, however, be extremely cautious not to remove completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each new hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domains are very simple to erase on the web hosting server, because they all are located into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very popular public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder placed 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. Check for yourself how excellent cPanel's domain folder structure 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 getting baffled? We positively are!
Weak Side Number 2: The same electronic mail folder arrangement
The mail folder configuration on the hosting server is strictly the same as that of the domains... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin chaps strongly reinforce their belief in God when managing the email folders on the mail server, praying not to botch things up too harshly.
Negative Sign No.3: A sheer shortage of domain management GUIs
Do we need to mention the sheer lack of a contemporary domain management tool - a place where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or administer domains, modify domains' Whois details, protect the Whois information, alter/set up name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not incorporate such a "modern" user interface at all. That's a gigantic weakness. An unjustifiable one, we would like to point out...
Disadvantage No.4: Multiple user login locations (min two, max 3)
How about the necessity for an additional login to make use of the invoice transaction, domain name and technical support administration user interface? That's aside from the cPanel login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel hosting distributor. At times, on the basis of the invoicing platform (especially made for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting vendor is using, the zealous users can end up with 2 extra login locations (1: the billing/domain name administration menu; 2: the trouble ticket support software solution), winding up with a total of three login places (counting cPanel).
Predicament Number 5: 120+ website hosting CP areas to grasp... quickly
cPanel presents for your consideration 120+ menus inside the web hosting CP. It's a terrific idea to learn each of them. And you'd better become familiar with them swiftly... That's way too insolent on cPanel's side.
With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based hosting providers:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one too...