How does cpanel-based hosting operate?
For your information, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel web space hosting offerings on today's web hosting market are generated by a quite inconsiderable business segment (as far as yearly money flow is concerned) named hosting reseller. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small-sized business segment, which generates a vast number of different web hosting brand names, yet supplying strictly the same services: chiefly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Due to the fact that at least ninety eight percent of the site hosting offerings on the whole webspace hosting market offer the very same service: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based webspace hosting prices are alike. Quite identical. Giving those who need a top web hosting service almost no other hosting platform/Control Panel alternative. So, there is merely one single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand web site hosting trademarks around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than two percent, remark that one...
200k "website hosting providers", all cPanel-based, yet diversely branded
The website hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offerings" Google reveals to all of us come down to merely one and the same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different web page hosting trademarked names. Suppose you are just a regular chap who's not very well acquainted with (as most of us) with the website creation procedures and the webspace hosting platforms, which in fact power the different domains and web portals . Are you prepared to make your web hosting selection? Is there any web page hosting variant you can select? Sure there is, right now there are more than 200,000 website hosting providers in existence. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200,000+ different web page hosting brand names across the world will give you literally the same cPanel hosting CP and platform, named in a different way, with literally the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the variety on the present-day web space hosting marketplace is... Full stop.
The hosting LOTTO we are all paricipating in
Simple mathematics reveals that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting company is a colossal stroke of luck. There is a less than one in 50 chance that an event like that will happen! Less than one in fifty...
The strengths and weaknesses of the cPanel-based web space hosting solution
Let's not be harsh with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and possibly satisfied most web space hosting business demands. To put it briefly, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have only one domain name to host. But, if you have more domain names...
Disadvantage No.1: An imbecilic domain name folder configuration
If you have 2 or more domain names, though, be very careful not to delete completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will dub each new hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domain names are quite simple to remove on the 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 is a folder placed 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. Check for yourself how fantastic cPanel's domain name folder arrangement is:
public_html (here my-default-domain.com is located)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)
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 name)
Are you becoming confused? We clearly are!
Inconvenience No.2: The same electronic mail folder setup
The electronic mail folder structure on the web hosting server is exactly the same as that of the domains... Making the same error twice?!? The sysadmin blokes firmly fortify their belief in God when coping with the electronic mail folders on the electronic mail server, hoping not to screw things up too seriously.
Weak Point Number Three: An entire absence of domain manipulation interfaces
Do we have to refer to the utter absence of a modern domain name administration interface - a location where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or administer domains, change domains' Whois information, shield the Whois information, edit/create nameservers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not provide such a "contemporary" interface at all. That's a major shortcoming. An unpardonable one, we wish to point out...
Disadvantage No.4: Multiple user login places (min two, maximum 3)
How about the necessity for an extra login to avail of the invoicing transaction, domain name and tech support administration software platform? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel web site hosting provider. Sometimes, on the basis of the invoicing transaction platform (especially built for cPanel only) the cPanel web hosting distributor is availing of, the keen customers can wind up with 2 extra login locations (1: the billing/domain name administration GUI; 2: the trouble ticket support platform), winding up with a total of three user login locations (counting cPanel).
Downside Number Five: More than one hundred and twenty web site hosting Control Panel sections to become familiar with... fast
cPanel offers for your consideration more than a hundred and twenty departments inside the website hosting Control Panel. It's a marvelous idea to memorize each and every one of them. And you'd better grasp them briskly... That's quite impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based web space hosting distributors:
As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one as well...