How Does cPanel Web Hosting Function?
For your info, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel-based hosting offerings on the present-day web hosting marketplace are provided by a very insignificant business segment (when it comes to annual capital flow) known as reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a sort of a small-size marketing segment, which furnishes an enormous number of different web hosting brand names, yet providing strictly the same thing: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because of the fact that at least 98% of the web hosting offers on the entire web hosting market offer strictly the same service: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting prices are similar. Quite identical. Leaving for those who require a top web hosting service virtually no other website hosting platform/CP option. So, there is just a single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand web hosting brand names in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2 percent, note that one...
200,000 "hosting service providers", all cPanel-based, yet differently branded
The hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offers" Google reveals to all of us come down to merely one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different hosting trademarked names. Assume you are just an ordinary bloke who's not very well aware of (as most of us) with the site making processes and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the separate domains and web portals. Are you ready to make your hosting choice? Is there any web hosting option you can choose? Sure there is, today there are more than 200k web hosting firms out there. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these more than two hundred thousand unique website hosting brands across the world will give you strictly the same cPanel website hosting CP and platform, labeled in a different way, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how large the assortment on today's web hosting marketplace is... Period.
The hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in
Simple math shows that to select a non-cPanel based web hosting supplier is a colossal strike of luck. There is a less than one in 50 chance that a phenomenon like that will happen! Less than one in fifty...
The pros and cons of the cPanel-based hosting solution
Let's not be cruel with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and possibly fulfilled all website hosting market prerequisites. In short, cPanel can do the trick if you have just a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Problem Number 1: A dumb domain name folder configuration
If you have 2 or more domains, though, be ultra cautious not to delete fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each next hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domains are very easy to delete on the web hosting server, because they all are located into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to delete the files of the add-on domains, please. Observe for yourself how fabulous cPanel's domain name folder system 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 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)
Are you growing nonplussed? We unquestionably are!
Inconvenience Number 2: The same mail folder arrangement
The e-mail folder structure on the web server is absolutely the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin chums strongly reinforce their belief in God when tackling the electronic mail folders on the email server, hoping not to muck things up too fatally.
Shortcoming No.3: A complete absence of domain manipulation user interfaces
Do we need to mention the thorough lack of a contemporary domain manipulation GUI - a place where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or administer domain names, edit domain names' Whois info, secure the Whois info, change/set up name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not involve such a "contemporary" tool at all. That's a gigantic inconvenience. An inexcusable one, we wish to point out...
Predicament No.4: Multiple user login locations (minimum 2, maximum three)
What about the necessity for an additional login to make use of the invoicing, domain and technical support management platform? That's apart from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel hosting vendor. At times, on the basis of the billing system (especially invented for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting corporation is utilizing, the keen clients can wind up with two additional login locations (1: the billing transaction/domain management menu; 2: the trouble ticket support interface), ending up with an aggregate of three user login places (including cPanel).
Downside No.5: More than a hundred and twenty web hosting Control Panel sections to memorize... swiftly
cPanel presents to your attention more than 120 menus inside the website hosting Control Panel. It's a glorious idea to become familiar with each and every one of them. And you'd better get familiar with them swiftly... That's excessively impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting corporations:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Note that one too...