What Does cPanel Web Hosting Stand for?
For your information, it's useful to be aware that most of the cPanel-based hosting offers on today's website hosting marketplace are supplied by a very insignificant business segment (as far as annual cash flow is concerned) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small-size business segment, which furnishes a huge quantity of different web hosting brand names, yet offering absolutely the same solutions: chiefly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Due to the fact that at least 98 percent of the web hosting offers on the entire web hosting market supply precisely the same service: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel hosting price tags are similar. Very identical. Leaving for those in need of a top web hosting service practically no other web hosting platform/web hosting Control Panel alternative. Thus, there is only one fact: out of more than two hundred thousand website hosting trademarks around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than two percent, remark that one...
Two hundred thousand "hosting vendors", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely labeled
The hosting "diversity" and the website hosting "offers" Google presents to us boil down to merely one and the same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different website hosting brand names. Imagine you are only a regular chap who's not very well acquainted with (as the majority of us) with the web page creation procedures and the web hosting platforms, which in fact power the individual domains and web sites. Are you prepared to make your web hosting decision? Is there any web hosting variant you can settle on? Of course there is, right now there are more than 200,000 hosting firms out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ unique website hosting brands in the world will offer you strictly the same cPanel website hosting CP and platform, labeled differently, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how large the diversity on the contemporary web hosting market is... Full stop.
The hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in
Simple mathematics shows that to pick a non-cPanel based web hosting supplier is an immense stroke of fortune. There is a less than one in 50 chance that something like that will take place! Less than one in fifty...
The pluses and minuses of the cPanel hosting solution
Let's not be pitiless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and presumably met all hosting business requirements. In brief, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have just a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Negative Side No.1: A ludicrous domain name folder structure
If you have 2 or more domains, however, be very attentive not to erase completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each subsequent hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are quite easy to erase on the hosting server, because they all are placed into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder placed inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to erase the files of the add-on domains, please. Check for yourself how terrific cPanel's domain name folder setup 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)
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 baffled? We unquestionably are!
Shortcoming No.2: The very same electronic mail folder system
The e-mail folder arrangement on the server is precisely the same as that of the domains... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The admin guys firmly enhance their faith in God when handling the mail folders on the email server, hoping not to botch things up too harshly.
Inconvenience Number Three: An utter deficiency of domain name management interfaces
Do we need to bring up the absolute absence of a contemporary domain manipulation interface - a place where you can: register/move/renew/park or administer domains, modify domains' Whois information, secure the Whois information, alter/set up nameservers (DNS) and DNS records? cPanel does not provide such a "contemporary" menu at all. That's a big disadvantage. An inexcusable one, we would like to point out...
Predicament Number 4: Many login locations (min two, maximum 3)
How about the demand for an additional login to utilize the invoicing transaction, domain and tech support management platform? That's apart from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel hosting provider. Now and then, based on the invoicing tool (principally built for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel hosting vendor is availing of, the avid clients can wind up with 2 extra login places (1: the billing transaction/domain administration platform; 2: the trouble ticket support software), ending up with an aggregate of three user login locations (including cPanel).
Disadvantage Number Five: More than a hundred and twenty website hosting CP menus to get to know... fast
cPanel offers to your attention 120+ areas inside the website hosting Control Panel. It's a fine idea to memorize each of them. And you'd better get to know them promptly... That's inordinately arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting vendors:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one too...