How Does cPanel Website Hosting Function?
For your info, it's useful to be aware that the majority of the cPanel-based web hosting offerings on the contemporary web hosting marketplace are furnished by a very insignificant marketing niche (when it comes to yearly money flow) called hosting reseller. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small marketing niche, which supplies a vast quantity of different web hosting brands, yet supplying absolutely the same services: mainly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because at least ninety eight percent of the website hosting offerings on the entire website hosting market offer strictly the same thing: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel web hosting prices are identical. Quite similar. Giving those who require a top web hosting service almost no other web hosting platform/web hosting CP option. Thus, there is simply one fact: out of more than 200,000 web hosting brands worldwide, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than two percent, mind that one...
200k "web hosting suppliers", all cPanel-based, yet differently branded
The web hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offerings" Google presents to all of us boil down to merely one and the very same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different hosting trademarked names. Assume you are merely an ordinary fellow who's not very familiar with (as the majority of us) with the web site making processes and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the various domains and web portals. Are you prepared to make your hosting choice? Is there any web hosting option you can select? Sure there is, now there are more than two hundred thousand web hosting companies out there. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200,000+ unique website hosting brands in the world will give you strictly the same cPanel web hosting Control Panel and platform, branded differently, with the very same price tags! WOW! That's how great the assortment on the current web hosting market is... Full stop.
The web hosting LOTTO we are all participating in
Simple mathematics shows that to pick a non-cPanel based web hosting distributor is a mammoth 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 upsides and downsides of the cPanel web hosting solution
Let's not be severe with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and perhaps covered most web hosting industry requirements. 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...
Negative Point No.1: A foolish domain folder arrangement
If you have 2 or more domains, though, be ultra cautious not to erase completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each new hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domain names are quite simple to delete on the web hosting server, since they all are created into the root folder of the default domain, which is the quite popular 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 try not to delete the files of the add-on domain names, please. Discover for yourself how fabulous cPanel's domain name folder structure is:
public_html (here my-default-domain.com is situated)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 name)
Are you getting nonplussed? We definitely are!
Problem Number Two: The very same electronic mail folder setup
The mail folder arrangement on the web server is strictly the same as that of the domains... Making the very same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin boys firmly fortify their belief in God when managing the email folders on the email server, praying not to botch things up too harshly.
Predicament Number Three: An utter shortage of domain management options
Do we have to mention the entire shortage of a modern domain manipulation platform - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or administer domain names, edit domain names' Whois information, secure the Whois details, modify/create name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not contain such a "modern" tool at all. That's a huge weakness. An unjustifiable one, we would like to add...
Weak Side No.4: Numerous user login locations (min two, max three)
What about the demand for another login to utilize the billing transaction, domain and technical support administration GUI? That's apart from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel web hosting firm. Sometimes, depending on the invoice transaction platform (principally tailored for cPanel only) the cPanel web hosting firm is making use of, the keen customers can wind up with two extra logins (1: the billing/domain name administration interface; 2: the trouble ticket support software), ending up with an aggregate of three user login locations (counting cPanel).
Negative Point Number Five: More than one hundred and twenty web hosting CP menus to get familiar with... swiftly
cPanel presents for your consideration more than a hundred and twenty menus inside the Control Panel. It's a superb idea to grasp each of them. And you'd better memorize them briskly... That's very arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel web hosting distributors:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one too...