How does cpanel-based web hosting work?
For your info, it's good to know that most of the cPanel hosting offerings on the present-day web page hosting marketplace are generated by a quite insignificant business niche (when it comes to annual cash flow) called hosting reseller. Reseller website hosting is a sort of a small-scale marketing segment, which furnishes an enormous amount of different web hosting brand names, yet offering strictly the same services: chiefly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98 percent of the web hosting offers on the whole web space hosting marketplace supply literally the same service: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting price tags are similar. Very much alike. Giving those in need of a top web hosting service virtually no other web space hosting platform/website hosting CP choice. Thus, there is merely one single fact: out of more than 200,000 web site hosting brands around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2%, note that one...
200,000 "web page hosting firms", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely branded
The site hosting "variety" and the webspace hosting "offerings" Google reveals to us come down to just one and the same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different website hosting trademarked names. Assume you are just a regular guy who's not very well aware of (as the majority of us) with the web site development processes and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the various domain names and web portals . Are you prepared to make your web hosting selection? Is there any web hosting alternative you can select? Of course there is, right now there are more than two hundred thousand web page hosting corporations out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ different web page hosting brand names around the world will give you absolutely the same cPanel site hosting CP and platform, named in a different way, with literally the same price tags! WOW! That's how vast the assortment on the current web hosting marketplace is... Period.
The web space hosting LOTTO we are all paricipating in
Simple math shows that to select a non-cPanel based web hosting distributor is a great stroke of luck. There is a less than one in 50 chance that something like that will occur! Less than one in 50...
The advantages and disadvantages of the cPanel-based website hosting solution
Let's not be harsh with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modern and presumably met all hosting business prerequisites. In brief, cPanel can do the job for you if you have just one single domain name to host. But, if you have more domain names...
Downside No.1: A dumb domain name folder configuration
If you have two or more domain names, however, be ultra careful not to erase completely 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). The files of the add-on domains are very easy to erase on the web hosting server, because they all are placed into the root folder of the default domain, which is the quite well known 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 remove the files of the add-on domains, please. See for yourself how great cPanel's domain folder configuration 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)
public_html/my-third-domain.com (an add-on domain)
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 name)
Are you growing puzzled? We unquestionably are!
Weak Side No.2: The very same e-mail folder structure
The 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 fortify their faith in God when managing the mail folders on the electronic mail server, hoping not to mess things up too irretrievably.
Predicament Number Three: A total lack of domain name administration tools
Do we have to refer to the sheer lack of a modern domain manipulation GUI - a place where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or manage domain names, alter domain names' Whois information, protect the Whois information, modify/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not provide such a "contemporary" tool at all. That's a colossal inconvenience. An inexcusable one, we wish to point out...
Problem Number Four: Multiple user login places (min two, max three)
How about the necessity for an extra login to access the billing transaction, domain and tech support management platform? That's aside from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based web page hosting provider. Occasionally, depending on the billing transaction system (particularly developed for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel web hosting company is utilizing, the keen users can end up with two extra login places (1: the invoicing/domain name administration software; 2: the trouble ticket support software), ending up with a total of 3 user login places (counting cPanel).
Downside Number 5: More than a hundred and twenty web hosting CP areas to learn... fast
cPanel offers to your attention more than 120 areas inside the hosting Control Panel. It's a wonderful idea to memorize each and every one of them. And you'd better get to know them briskly... That's very insolent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based web site hosting vendors:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one as well...