What Actually is cPanel Website Hosting?
For your info, it's good to be aware that most of the cPanel-based Website Hosting offers on the present-day web hosting marketplace are provided by a very insignificant marketing segment (as far as yearly cash flow is concerned) known as reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a kind of a small marketing niche, which supplies a great amount of different web hosting trademarks, yet furnishing the very same solutions: mostly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Due to the fact that at least ninety eight percent of the web hosting offers on the whole web hosting market furnish precisely the same thing: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel-based Website Hosting price tags are alike. Quite identical. Giving those who need a top web hosting service almost no other website hosting platform/web hosting CP alternative. Thus, there is simply one fact: out of more than 200k website hosting brands all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than two percent, mind that one...
200,000 "Website Hosting distributors", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely labeled
The Website Hosting "variety" and the hosting "offers" Google shows to all of us come down to just one and the same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different web hosting trademarked names. Imagine you are just a regular chap who's not very well acquainted with (as the majority of us) with the web site making procedures and the hosting platforms, which in fact power the individual domain names and web portals. Are you ready to make your web hosting choice? Is there any website hosting variant you can choose? Sure there is, at the moment there are more than 200,000 website hosting companies in existence. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ unique web hosting brands across the world will give you the same cPanel website hosting CP and platform, dubbed in a different way, with strictly the same price tags! WOW! That's how enormous the assortment on the contemporary web hosting marketplace is... Period.
The Website Hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in
Simple math reveals that to run into a non-cPanel based web hosting distributor is a big stroke of luck. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that an event like that will take place! Less than 1 in fifty...
The pluses and minuses of the cPanel-based Website Hosting solution
Let's not be fierce with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and probably fulfilled all website hosting market preconditions. In brief, cPanel can do the trick if you have only a single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Drawback No.1: An imbecilic domain name folder structure
If you have two or more domains, though, be extremely cautious not to erase fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each subsequent 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 hosting server, since they all are set up into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain name is a folder placed inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to erase the files of the add-on domains, please. See for yourself how amazing cPanel's domain name folder configuration 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 name)
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 growing puzzled? We doubtlessly are!
Negative Point Number 2: The very same e-mail folder system
The electronic mail folder configuration on the web server is strictly the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin boys strongly increase their faith in God when dealing with the mail folders on the e-mail server, hoping not to bungle things up too harshly.
Negative Sign Number 3: An utter lack of domain manipulation interfaces
Do we have to bring up the total shortage of a modern domain manipulation GUI - a place where you can: register/move/renew/park or manage domain names, alter domain names' Whois info, shield the Whois information, modify/create name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not include such a "contemporary" user interface at all. That's a great weakness. An unpardonable one, we want to add...
Downside Number 4: Many login places (minimum 2, max three)
How about the necessity for an extra login to access the billing transaction, domain name and tech support management user interface? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel Website Hosting company. Sometimes, based on the invoicing transaction system (principally made for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel Website Hosting supplier is using, the avid clients can wind up with 2 extra login places (1: the billing/domain management menu; 2: the trouble ticket support platform), ending up with a total of three user login places (counting cPanel).
Drawback Number Five: 120+ CP departments to learn... swiftly
cPanel offers for your consideration more than 120 areas inside the web hosting CP. It's a great idea to get to know each of them. And you'd better get acquainted with them fast... That's excessively impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due recognition, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel Website Hosting distributors:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one as well...