How does cpanel hosting function?
For your info, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel site hosting offers on the present web page hosting marketplace are generated by a very unsubstantial business segment (as far as annual money flow is concerned) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller webspace hosting is a kind of a small-scale marketing niche, which supplies a vast quantity of different web hosting brand names, yet providing one and the same services: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98 percent of the web space hosting offerings on the whole webspace hosting marketplace offer one and the very same service: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel web hosting prices are identical. Quite identical. Leaving for those who demand a top web hosting service virtually no other website hosting platform/site hosting CP alternative. So, there is just one single fact: out of more than 200k web hosting brand names around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2 percent, mark that one...
200,000 "web space hosting firms", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly named
The website hosting "variety" and the hosting "offers" Google presents to all of us boil down to just one thing: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different hosting brand names. Assume you are simply a normal bloke who's not very familiar with (as the majority of us) with the website development procedures and the web site hosting platforms, which in fact power the separate domain names and web portals . Are you ready to make your hosting selection? Is there any website hosting variant you can decide upon? Of course there is, at the moment there are more than 200,000 web site hosting corporations in existence. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200,000+ unique website hosting brand names all over the world will give you strictly the same cPanel web page hosting CP and platform, branded in a different way, with absolutely the same price tags! WOW! That's how big the diversity on the present hosting market is... Period.
The web space hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple mathematics shows that to run into a non-cPanel based web hosting service provider is a big strike of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that a phenomenon like that will take place! Less than 1 in fifty...
The positive and negative points of the cPanel-based hosting solution
Let's not be relentless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and probably answered all web hosting business requirements. To cut a long story short, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Downside Number 1: A foolish domain folder structure
If you have two or more domains, though, be extremely watchful not to remove entirely 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 name). The files of the add-on domains are quite simple to erase on the hosting server, because they all are set up into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very popular 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 try not to erase the files of the add-on domain names, please. Check for yourself how good cPanel's domain name folder arrangement 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 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)
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 certainly are!
Weakness No.2: The very same email folder structure
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 boys strongly reinforce their belief in God when tackling the electronic mail folders on the mail server, praying not to muck things up too gravely.
Downside No.3: An entire deficiency of domain administration menus
Do we need to refer to the sheer shortage of a modern domain manipulation GUI - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or manage domain names, modify domains' Whois details, shield the Whois info, edit/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not include such a "contemporary" user interface at all. That's an enormous weakness. An unjustifiable one, we want to point out...
Shortcoming Number 4: Numerous login locations (minimum two, max 3)
What about the demand for an additional login to avail of the billing, domain and technical support administration software solution? That's aside from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based web hosting service provider. Sometimes, based on the invoicing transaction tool (principally intended for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel web hosting distributor is using, the avid customers can end up with 2 extra login places (1: the billing transaction/domain name administration section; 2: the trouble ticket support system), winding up with an aggregate of three user login places (counting cPanel).
Weak Point No.5: More than one hundred and twenty site hosting Control Panel sections to get familiar with... fast
cPanel presents to your attention 120+ areas inside the web page hosting Control Panel. It's a fine idea to get acquainted with each one of them. And you'd better get familiar with them rapidly... That's very arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting providers:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one as well...