What is cPanel Web Hosting?
For your info, it's good to be aware that most of the cPanel-based website hosting offers on the present website hosting market are furnished by a very unsubstantial marketing segment (when it comes to yearly cash flow) known as reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a sort of a small-sized business segment, which supplies a great amount of different web hosting brand names, yet offering exactly the same services: mainly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because of the fact that at least 98 percent of the web hosting offerings on the whole web hosting market provide one and the same thing: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based website hosting prices are alike. Quite identical. Leaving for those in need of a top web hosting service almost no other website hosting platform/website hosting Control Panel choice. Thus, there is simply one single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand website hosting brands around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2 percent, remark that one...
Two hundred thousand "website hosting vendors", all cPanel-based, yet diversely dubbed
The website hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offerings" Google reveals to us boil down to just one and the same thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different website hosting brand names. Assume you are just a normal guy who's not very well aware of (as the majority of us) with the website development processes and the website hosting platforms, which in fact power the separate domain names and online portals. Are you ready to make your web hosting pick? Is there any website hosting variant you can decide upon? Sure there is, as of now there are more than 200k hosting distributors out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these more than two hundred thousand different web hosting brands all over the world will give you the same cPanel web hosting Control Panel and platform, labeled differently, with the very same price tags! WOW! That's how vast the diversity on today's web hosting market is... Period.
The website hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in
Simple arithmetic demonstrates that to run into a non-cPanel based web hosting service provider is a great stroke of fortune. There is a less than one in fifty chance that something like that will occur! Less than 1 in 50...
The strong and weak points of the cPanel-based website hosting solution
Let's not be merciless with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modern and perhaps fulfilled most website hosting industry prerequisites. To cut a long story short, cPanel can do the trick if you have only one domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Weakness No.1: A foolish domain folder configuration
If you have 2 or more domain names, however, be ultra cautious not to delete entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will dub each new hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domains are quite easy to erase on the hosting 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 name 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 domain names, please. See for yourself how fantastic cPanel's domain name 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)
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)
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)
Are you growing perplexed? We positively are!
Negative Sign No.2: The very same mail folder system
The e-mail folder structure on the web hosting server is literally the same as that of the domain names... Making the same error twice?!? The sysadmin boys firmly enhance their faith in God when managing the e-mail folders on the mail server, hoping not to bungle things up too seriously.
Predicament Number 3: An entire deficiency of domain name management sections
Do we have to point out the entire deficiency of a contemporary domain administration GUI - a place where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or administer domain names, edit domains' Whois information, shield the Whois information, edit/set up nameservers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not furnish such a "contemporary" user interface at all. That's a colossal shortcoming. An unforgivable one, we would like to point out...
Shortcoming Number 4: Numerous login places (minimum two, maximum 3)
What about the demand for another login to utilize the invoice transaction, domain and tech support management system? That's apart from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel-based website hosting vendor. Sometimes, on the basis of the billing tool (especially tailored for cPanel only) the cPanel website hosting corporation is utilizing, the avid users can wind up with two additional login places (1: the invoice transaction/domain management GUI; 2: the trouble ticket support interface), winding up with an aggregate of three login places (counting cPanel).
Negative Aspect No.5: More than a hundred and twenty hosting CP sections to get to know... quickly
cPanel offers to your attention more than one hundred and twenty areas inside the website hosting Control Panel. It's a fantastic idea to memorize each and every one of them. And you'd better become acquainted with them swiftly... That's extremely impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel website hosting service providers:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one too...