How does cpanel-based web hosting function?
For your info, it's useful to know that the majority of the cPanel-based web hosting offerings on the contemporary website hosting market are supplied by a quite unsubstantial business niche (when it comes to yearly money flow) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller web site hosting is a sort of a small-sized marketing niche, which furnishes a great number of different web hosting trademarks, yet supplying exactly the same services: mainly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98 percent of the site hosting offerings on the entire site hosting marketplace offer literally the same solution: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel website hosting price tags are alike. Very identical. Leaving for those who need a top web hosting service virtually no other webspace hosting platform/web hosting Control Panel option. Thus, there is simply one single fact: out of more than 200,000 web space hosting brands in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2%, mind that one...
200,000 "web hosting suppliers", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly named
The site hosting "diversity" and the web space hosting "offers" Google shows to us boil down to just one and the very same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different hosting brand names. Suppose you are just a regular bloke who's not well aware of (as most of us) with the website creation procedures and the web page hosting platforms, which in fact power the respective domain names and web pages . Are you prepared to make your web hosting selection? Is there any web site hosting variant you can settle on? Of course there is, right now there are more than 200k web hosting providers out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200,000+ unique site hosting brands in the world will offer you strictly the same cPanel web page hosting Control Panel and platform, branded differently, with literally the same price tags! WOW! That's how big the variety on the present-day web hosting market is... Full stop.
The web hosting LOTTO we are all paricipating in
Simple mathematics reveals that to come across a non-cPanel based web hosting provider is an enormous strike of luck. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that an event like that will happen! Less than one in 50...
The positive and negative points of the cPanel-based website hosting solution
Let's not be pitiless with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and perhaps satisfied all webspace hosting market preconditions. To put it briefly, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only one single domain to host. But, if you have more domain names...
Problem Number 1: A foolish domain folder setup
If you have 2 or more domain names, however, be ultra attentive not to remove entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each new hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are very easy to remove on the hosting server, because they all are placed into the root folder of the default domain, which is the quite famous 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 attempt not to delete the files of the add-on domains, please. Decide for yourself how terrific cPanel's domain name 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)
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 confused? We positively are!
Shortcoming Number Two: The very same mail folder arrangement
The electronic mail folder structure on the web server is strictly the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The admin guys strongly fortify their belief in God when handling the electronic mail folders on the email server, hoping not to screw things up too gravely.
Disadvantage No.3: A sheer absence of domain name management interfaces
Do we have to cite the entire lack of a modern domain management GUI - a place where you can: register/move/renew/park or manage domain names, change domains' Whois info, secure the Whois information, change/create nameservers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not involve such a "modern" tool at all. That's a big disadvantage. An unforgivable one, we would like to add...
Inconvenience No.4: Numerous login places (min two, maximum 3)
What about the demand for another login to avail of the invoicing transaction, domain and tech support administration user interface? That's beside the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel site hosting supplier. Now and then, depending on the invoice transaction system (principally designed for cPanel solely) the cPanel web hosting supplier is making use of, the earnest customers can wind up with two extra login places (1: the invoicing/domain management tool; 2: the ticket support software platform), winding up with a total of 3 user login places (counting cPanel).
Inconvenience No.5: More than a hundred and twenty website hosting CP areas to learn... fast
cPanel presents for your consideration more than one hundred and twenty areas inside the webspace hosting CP. It's a remarkable idea to get familiar with each and every one of them. And you'd better memorize them swiftly... That's very impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based website hosting firms:
As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Note that one too...