How does cpanel-based website hosting work?
For your information, it's useful to know that the majority of the cPanel-based web hosting offerings on the current website hosting marketplace are furnished by a quite unsubstantial marketing niche (when it comes to annual cash flow) dubbed hosting reseller. Reseller hosting is a sort of a small-size marketing niche, which provides a great quantity of different web hosting brands, yet supplying exactly the same thing: chiefly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because of the fact that at least 98 percent of the web space hosting offers on the entire web hosting market offer literally the same thing: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel-based web page hosting price tags are identical. Very identical. Leaving for those who demand a top web hosting service virtually no other web space hosting platform/site hosting Control Panel choice. Thus, there is merely one fact: out of more than 200,000 website hosting trademarks all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than two percent, mark that one...
200k "site hosting firms", all cPanel-based, yet diversely dubbed
The web site hosting "variety" and the webspace hosting "offerings" Google reveals to all of us come down to just one and the same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different web site hosting trademarked names. Assume you are merely a regular fellow who's not very well aware of (as most of us) with the web site development processes and the web space hosting platforms, which actually power the individual domain names and web pages . Are you ready to make your hosting selection? Is there any hosting variant you can settle on? Sure there is, now there are more than 200k hosting service providers out there. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200k+ different web space hosting brands around the world will offer you exactly the same cPanel web site hosting CP and platform, labeled in a different way, with absolutely the same price tags! WOW! That's how great the assortment on the contemporary hosting market is... Period.
The hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple arithmetic demonstrates that to run into a non-cPanel based web hosting firm is a great stroke of fortune. There is a less than one in fifty chance that an event like that will take place! Less than 1 in fifty...
The strengths and weaknesses of the cPanel-based site hosting solution
Let's not be fierce with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and possibly fulfilled all web page hosting industry requirements. To cut a long story short, cPanel can do the job for you if you have just a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Downside Number 1: A moronic domain folder system
If you have two or more domain names, though, be extra watchful not to delete 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 server, because 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 attempt not to delete the files of the add-on domains, please. Check for yourself how great cPanel's domain folder system is:
public_html (here my-default-domain.com is located)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 absolutely are!
Negative Point Number Two: The very same e-mail folder setup
The email folder structure on the server is literally the same as that of the domains... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The admin chums strongly fortify their belief in God when managing the mail folders on the email server, hoping not to muck things up too irretrievably.
Downside Number Three: A complete lack of domain administration tools
Do we have to mention the sheer absence of a modern domain name administration tool - a place where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or manage domains, alter domains' Whois information, protect the Whois details, edit/create nameservers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not provide such a "contemporary" menu at all. That's a colossal inconvenience. An inexcusable one, we wish to point out...
Weakness No.4: Multiple user login places (min 2, maximum three)
What about the need for an extra login to utilize the invoicing transaction, domain name and technical support administration system? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based web site hosting provider. Now and then, based on the invoice transaction system (especially made for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel web hosting company is using, the avid clients can wind up with 2 extra login places (1: the invoicing transaction/domain administration tool; 2: the trouble ticket support platform), ending up with a total of three user login locations (including cPanel).
Negative Sign Number 5: 120+ CP areas to memorize... quickly
cPanel presents to your attention more than one hundred and twenty sections inside the hosting CP. It's a great idea to memorize each of them. And you'd better memorize them promptly... That's way too impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting suppliers:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Note that one as well...