What Precisely is cPanel Web Hosting?
For your info, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel-based hosting offerings on today's web hosting marketplace are generated by a quite unsubstantial marketing segment (when it comes to annual capital flow) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a kind of a small-size marketing niche, which supplies a huge amount of different web hosting brands, yet offering strictly the same thing: mainly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Due to the fact that at least ninety eight percent of the web hosting offerings on the whole website hosting marketplace provide strictly the same thing: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel hosting price tags are similar. Quite similar. Leaving for those in need of a top web hosting service practically no other website hosting platform/CP option. So, there is only a single fact: out of more than 200,000 website hosting brands in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2 percent, remark that one...
200k "hosting suppliers", all cPanel-based, yet diversely dubbed
The hosting "diversity" and the website hosting "offers" Google presents to us boil down to merely one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different hosting trademarked names. Suppose you are just an ordinary chap who's not very familiar with (as most of us) with the web page making procedures and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the individual domains and websites. Are you prepared to make your web hosting choice? Is there any website hosting alternative you can choose? Sure there is, now there are more than 200k web hosting suppliers out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these more than two hundred thousand unique web hosting brands worldwide will give you exactly the same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, branded in a different way, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how vast the diversity on the current web hosting market is... Full stop.
The hosting LOTTO we are all participating in
Simple math demonstrates that to run into a non-cPanel based web hosting company is a great strike of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that an event like that will take place! Less than one in 50...
The positive and negative aspects of the cPanel-based hosting solution
Let's not be harsh with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and perhaps satisfied most website hosting business preconditions. In brief, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only a single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Drawback No.1: An idiotic domain name folder setup
If you have 2 or more domain names, though, be ultra cautious not to erase entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will dub each subsequent hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domain names are very simple to erase on the web server, because they all are created 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 located inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to delete the files of the add-on domains, please. Observe for yourself how marvelous cPanel's domain name folder setup is:
public_html (here my-default-domain.com is situated)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 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 becoming baffled? We doubtlessly are!
Negative Aspect No.2: The very same mail folder system
The electronic mail folder arrangement on the hosting server is absolutely the same as that of the domains... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The admin chaps firmly strengthen their belief in God when tackling the electronic mail folders on the electronic mail server, praying not to screw things up too seriously.
Weakness Number 3: A complete lack of domain name manipulation options
Do we need to cite the total deficiency of a modern domain name management GUI - a location where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or administer domain names, alter domain names' Whois info, protect the Whois information, change/create name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not include such a "modern" tool at all. That's a big disadvantage. An unforgivable one, we want to point out...
Negative Aspect Number 4: Many login locations (min two, maximum three)
How about the demand for another login to access the billing, domain name and technical support management tool? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel hosting firm. At times, on the basis of the invoicing transaction platform (especially conceived for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting service provider is availing of, the earnest customers can end up with two additional logins (1: the billing transaction/domain name management software platform; 2: the trouble ticket support software), winding up with an aggregate of three login locations (counting cPanel).
Weakness No.5: More than 120 website hosting Control Panel departments to become acquainted with... briskly
cPanel presents to your attention more than a hundred and twenty departments inside the hosting CP. It's a glorious idea to memorize each of them. And you'd better pick them up rapidly... That's way too impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting suppliers:
As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one too...