What Precisely is cPanel Hosting?
For your information, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel hosting offerings on the present web hosting market are furnished by a very unsubstantial marketing segment (as far as yearly money flow is concerned) known as reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small-size marketing niche, which supplies a big number of different web hosting brands, yet supplying strictly the same solutions: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Due to the fact that at least 98 percent of the hosting offerings on the whole hosting market provide exactly the same service: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting price tags are similar. Very identical. Giving those who demand a top web hosting service almost no other website hosting platform/website hosting CP option. Thus, there is simply one single fact: out of more than 200k web hosting brand names in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than 2 percent, mind that one...
200k "hosting providers", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly branded
The hosting "diversity" and the web hosting "offers" Google shows to all of us boil down to merely one and the very same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different web hosting trademarked names. Assume you are only an ordinary guy who's not very well acquainted with (as most of us) with the website creation processes and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the different domain names and web sites. Are you prepared to make your web hosting choice? Is there any website hosting option you can choose? Sure there is, at present there are more than 200,000 web hosting vendors out there. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200k+ unique hosting brands all over the world will give you absolutely the same cPanel website hosting CP and platform, dubbed differently, with strictly the same price tags! WOW! That's how immense the assortment on the present web hosting market is... Full stop.
The hosting LOTTO we are all part of
Simple arithmetic shows that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting service provider is an enormous stroke of fortune. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that something like that will occur! Less than 1 in fifty...
The upsides and downsides of the cPanel-based hosting solution
Let's not be severe with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and probably met most web hosting industry demands. To cut a long story short, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have just a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Inconvenience Number 1: A ludicrous domain folder structure
If you have two or more domain names, however, be extra cautious not to erase fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each new hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are very simple to erase on the hosting server, because they all are set up into the root folder of the default domain, which is the quite famous 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 erase the files of the add-on domains, please. Discover for yourself how fantastic cPanel's domain 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 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 becoming bewildered? We categorically are!
Negative Sign Number 2: The very same email folder configuration
The electronic mail folder arrangement on the server is literally the same as that of the domains... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin chaps strongly enhance their faith in God when managing the e-mail folders on the email server, praying not to mess things up too badly.
Weak Point No.3: An utter shortage of domain name management sections
Do we have to refer to the entire shortage of a contemporary domain manipulation interface - a location where you can: register/move/renew/park or administer domain names, modify domains' Whois info, protect the Whois details, edit/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not have such a "contemporary" section at all. That's a great disadvantage. An unforgivable one, we wish to add...
Problem Number 4: Multiple login locations (min 2, maximum three)
How about the demand for another login to access the billing, domain and tech support management interface? That's aside from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel hosting firm. Sometimes, based on the invoice transaction tool (principally created for cPanel solely) the cPanel hosting distributor is using, the enthusiastic clients can end up with two additional login locations (1: the billing/domain name management menu; 2: the trouble ticket support system), winding up with a total of 3 login locations (counting cPanel).
Weak Side Number Five: More than a hundred and twenty hosting Control Panel areas to become acquainted with... briskly
cPanel presents to your attention more than 120 sections inside the web hosting Control Panel. It's a fabulous idea to learn each and every one of them. And you'd better get to know them promptly... That's extremely impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting firms:
As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one too...