How does cpanel-based hosting function?
For your info, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel-based hosting offerings on the contemporary web space hosting market are provided by a quite unsubstantial business segment (as far as annual money flow is concerned) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller web page hosting is a sort of a small-sized marketing segment, which provides a huge number of different web hosting brand names, yet furnishing exactly the same services: chiefly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because at least 98% of the site hosting offerings on the whole site hosting marketplace provide one and the very same solution: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based web hosting prices are similar. Quite identical. Leaving for those in need of a top web hosting service practically no other web site hosting platform/site hosting CP alternative. So, there is merely one single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand site hosting brands all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2%, note that one...
200,000 "webspace hosting firms", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly labeled
The web hosting "diversity" and the hosting "offers" Google presents to us come down to just one solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different web page hosting trademarked names. Assume you are only an ordinary chap who's not very familiar with (as the majority of us) with the web page creation processes and the web site hosting platforms, which actually power the separate domain names and sites . Are you ready to make your hosting choice? Is there any webspace hosting variant you can choose? Of course there is, at the moment there are more than 200,000 site hosting firms in existence. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ different web hosting brands worldwide will give you precisely the same cPanel web hosting Control Panel and platform, labeled in a different way, with literally the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the diversity on today's hosting marketplace is... Period.
The web space hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple arithmetic reveals that to pick a non-cPanel based web hosting vendor is a mammoth stroke of luck. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that an event like that will occur! Less than one in 50...
The pluses and minuses of the cPanel hosting solution
Let's not be cruel with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and probably satisfied most web hosting business preconditions. In brief, cPanel can do the job for you if you have just one domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Drawback Number 1: A stupid domain name folder structure
If you have two or more domain names, though, be extra attentive 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). The files of the add-on domain names are very simple to erase on the web server, because they all are created into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite famous 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 remove the files of the add-on domain names, please. Verify for yourself how excellent cPanel's domain name folder structure 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)
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 disorientated? We surely are!
Negative Side Number Two: The very same electronic mail folder system
The email folder configuration on the hosting server is absolutely the same as that of the domains... Making the same error twice?!? The admin guys firmly enhance their faith in God when managing the mail folders on the mail server, hoping not to mess things up too severely.
Negative Sign No.3: An utter shortage of domain manipulation interfaces
Do we need to bring up the sheer deficiency of a contemporary domain name manipulation interface - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or manage domain names, alter domain names' Whois information, shield the Whois info, modify/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not provide such a "contemporary" tool at all. That's a major inconvenience. An unpardonable one, we would like to add...
Inconvenience Number Four: Multiple user login places (min 2, maximum 3)
What about the need for another login to utilize the billing, domain name and tech support management menu? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based webspace hosting vendor. Occasionally, based on the invoicing tool (particularly made for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel web hosting provider is utilizing, the earnest users can end up with 2 extra login places (1: the billing transaction/domain management interface; 2: the trouble ticket support GUI), winding up with an aggregate of three user login places (counting cPanel).
Shortcoming Number 5: 120+ CP sections to get familiar with... rapidly
cPanel presents to your attention more than one hundred and twenty departments inside the CP. It's a superb idea to learn each one of them. And you'd better become familiar with them promptly... That's inordinately arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based hosting distributors:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one as well...