How does cpanel-based hosting work?
For your info, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel-based hosting offerings on the present-day site hosting marketplace are generated by a very inconsiderable marketing niche (when it comes to yearly cash flow) dubbed hosting reseller. Reseller web page hosting is a kind of a small-sized marketing niche, which furnishes a vast number of different web hosting brand names, yet furnishing strictly the same solutions: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because of the fact that at least 98 percent of the hosting offerings on the whole web hosting market provide precisely the same service: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel site hosting price tags are similar. Very much alike. Giving those who demand a top web hosting service almost no other site hosting platform/Control Panel option. So, there is only a single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand hosting trademarks all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than 2 percent, mind that one...
200,000 "webspace hosting vendors", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely branded
The site hosting "diversity" and the webspace hosting "offers" Google presents to us come down to just one solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different web space hosting trademarked names. Assume you are only an average fellow who's not well aware of (as most of us) with the site development processes and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the separate domain names and web pages . Are you ready to make your hosting choice? Is there any webspace hosting option you can choose? Sure there is, at the moment there are more than 200k website hosting companies out there. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ unique website hosting brand names all over the world will give you strictly the same cPanel Control Panel and platform, branded in a different way, with absolutely the same price tags! WOW! That's how vast the diversity on the current web page hosting marketplace is... Period.
The web page hosting LOTTO we are all paricipating in
Simple math shows that to chance upon a non-cPanel based web hosting service provider is a great stroke of fortune. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that a phenomenon like that will occur! Less than one in 50...
The positive and negative aspects of the cPanel web site hosting solution
Let's not be severe with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and presumably satisfied most web hosting business demands. In brief, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have just a single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Weakness Number One: A moronic domain folder system
If you have two or more domain names, though, be ultra cautious not to delete entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will dub each next hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domain names are quite simple to delete on the web server, since they all are created into the root folder of the default domain, which is the quite well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to erase the files of the add-on domain names, please. Discover for yourself how amazing cPanel's domain 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 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 name)
Are you becoming confused? We undoubtedly are!
Disadvantage Number Two: The same email folder arrangement
The electronic mail folder configuration on the server is strictly the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin guys firmly fortify their faith in God when coping with the email folders on the electronic mail server, hoping not to fuck things up too fatally.
Inconvenience No.3: An entire shortage of domain management sections
Do we need to mention the sheer deficiency of a modern domain name manipulation tool - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or administer domain names, modify domain names' Whois information, protect the Whois info, edit/create name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not include such a "modern" interface at all. That's a huge shortcoming. An unforgettable one, we want to point out...
Weak Side Number 4: Multiple user login locations (min two, maximum 3)
What about the demand for an extra login to make use of the billing transaction, domain and technical support management section? That's aside from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel-based web site hosting distributor. Now and then, depending on the billing system (especially made for cPanel only) the cPanel web hosting distributor is availing of, the eager customers can end up with two additional login locations (1: the billing transaction/domain name administration interface; 2: the ticket support platform), winding up with a total of 3 user login places (including cPanel).
Negative Side Number Five: 120+ web page hosting Control Panel sections to learn... promptly
cPanel presents to your attention more than one hundred and twenty departments inside the webspace hosting CP. It's a wonderful idea to become familiar with each one of them. And you'd better get to know them rapidly... That's quite impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting distributors:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one too...