How does cpanel-based site hosting operate?
For your info, it's useful to be aware that most of the cPanel-based web site hosting offers on the present web hosting market are furnished by a very inconsiderable business niche (as far as annual money flow is concerned) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller hosting is a kind of a small-scale marketing niche, which supplies a big amount of different web hosting trademarks, yet providing precisely the same services: mainly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because at least 98 percent of the web hosting offerings on the entire hosting market supply the same solution: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel web page hosting prices are alike. Quite identical. Giving those who require a top web hosting service practically no other web space hosting platform/Control Panel choice. So, there is merely one fact: out of more than two hundred thousand webspace hosting brand names worldwide, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2%, remark that one...
200k "webspace hosting distributors", all cPanel-based, yet differently branded
The web site hosting "diversity" and the hosting "offers" Google reveals to us boil down to just one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different web space hosting brand names. Imagine you are simply a regular bloke who's not very well aware of (as the majority of us) with the website development processes and the web page hosting platforms, which actually power the various domain names and sites . Are you prepared to make your hosting pick? Is there any site hosting option you can settle on? Of course there is, nowadays there are more than 200,000 web hosting service providers out there. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these 200k+ different website hosting brand names all over the world will offer you the same cPanel web space hosting Control Panel and platform, branded differently, with precisely the same price tags! WOW! That's how vast the variety on the present web page hosting market is... Full stop.
The website hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple arithmetic reveals that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting firm is an immense stroke of fortune. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that a phenomenon like that will occur! Less than one in 50...
The strengths and weaknesses of the cPanel site hosting solution
Let's not be relentless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and probably covered most web space hosting business demands. To put it briefly, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have just one single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Negative Sign Number One: A stupid domain folder system
If you have two or more domain names, though, be extra cautious not to erase entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each next hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domain names are very simple to remove on the web 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 situated inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domain names, please. See for yourself how excellent 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)
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 confused? We absolutely are!
Inconvenience Number Two: The same e-mail folder system
The e-mail folder configuration on the web hosting server is literally the same as that of the domains... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin boys firmly increase their faith in God when coping with the mail folders on the email server, hoping not to muck things up too irretrievably.
Predicament Number 3: A thorough lack of domain management sections
Do we have to refer to the entire absence of a modern domain name management interface - a location where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or manage domain names, alter domains' Whois details, protect the Whois info, change/create name servers (DNS) and DNS records? cPanel does not involve such a "modern" section at all. That's a huge downside. An unjustifiable one, we want to point out...
Problem No.4: Multiple user login locations (min two, maximum three)
How about the need for an extra login to utilize the invoicing, domain name and tech support administration section? That's beside the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based hosting corporation. Sometimes, based on the invoicing transaction tool (especially tailored for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel web hosting vendor is utilizing, the devoted clients can wind up with 2 additional logins (1: the invoice transaction/domain administration platform; 2: the trouble ticket support software solution), ending up with a total of three login locations (counting cPanel).
Weakness Number Five: More than a hundred and twenty web hosting Control Panel sections to grasp... promptly
cPanel presents to your attention 120+ areas inside the hosting CP. It's a fine idea to pick up each one of them. And you'd better become acquainted with them promptly... That's way too impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based web hosting firms:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Note that one too...