What Precisely is cPanel Web Hosting?
For your info, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel-based Web Hosting offers on today's website hosting market are generated by a quite insubstantial marketing segment (as far as annual capital flow is concerned) named reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a sort of a small-scale marketing niche, which furnishes a huge quantity of different web hosting brands, yet offering exactly the same services: mostly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Owing to the fact that at least ninety eight percent of the web hosting offers on the whole website hosting marketplace furnish absolutely the same thing: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based Web Hosting prices are alike. Quite identical. Leaving for those who need a top web hosting service virtually no other web hosting platform/hosting CP alternative. So, there is simply one fact: out of more than 200k hosting brands around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2%, remark that one...
Two hundred thousand "Web Hosting service providers", all cPanel-based, yet differently dubbed
The Web Hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offers" Google reveals to us come down to just one thing: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different hosting brand names. Assume you are simply an ordinary person who's not well aware of (as most of us) with the web site development processes and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the respective domains and web portals. Are you ready to make your hosting choice? Is there any website hosting variant you can pick? Of course there is, at the moment there are more than two hundred thousand hosting service providers in existence. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200,000+ different website hosting brand names across the world will give you the same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, labeled in a different way, with strictly the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the variety on the contemporary web hosting marketplace is... Period.
The Web Hosting LOTTO we are all part of
Simple math reveals that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting service provider is a big stroke of fortune. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that an event like that will happen! Less than 1 in fifty...
The strong and weak points of the cPanel-based Web Hosting solution
Let's not be fierce with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and presumably satisfied all web hosting business preconditions. To put it briefly, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only one domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Negative Point No.1: A stupid domain folder arrangement
If you have 2 or more domains, though, be ultra careful not to remove completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each new 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 web server, since they all are created into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain name is a folder located inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domains, please. Examine for yourself how amazing cPanel's domain folder configuration 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 name)
public_html/my-second-wife (a folder part of my-default-domain.com)
public_html/my-second-wife.net (an add-on domain name)
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 growing disorientated? We undoubtedly are!
Weakness Number 2: The same e-mail folder configuration
The mail folder configuration on the hosting server is absolutely the same as that of the domains... Making the very same mistake twice?!? The admin chaps firmly increase their faith in God when tackling the e-mail folders on the mail server, hoping not to mess things up too irretrievably.
Negative Aspect Number Three: An entire lack of domain administration tools
Do we have to point out the sheer absence of a contemporary domain manipulation menu - a location where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or manage domains, alter domain names' Whois info, protect the Whois info, change/create name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not involve such a "contemporary" menu at all. That's an enormous weakness. An unpardonable one, we want to point out...
Problem No.4: Many user login places (min two, max 3)
How about the necessity for an extra login to make use of the invoice transaction, domain name and tech support administration system? That's aside from the cPanel login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel-based Web Hosting provider. Sometimes, on the basis of the billing system (particularly invented for cPanel solely) the cPanel Web Hosting company is using, the ardent clients can wind up with two additional login locations (1: the billing/domain management user interface; 2: the ticket support GUI), winding up with an aggregate of three user login locations (counting cPanel).
Negative Point Number 5: 120+ website hosting Control Panel sections to grasp... fast
cPanel presents for your consideration 120+ sections inside the web hosting Control Panel. It's a great idea to get to know each and every one of them. And you'd better become familiar with them briskly... That's way too arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel Web Hosting firms:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one too...