How does cpanel web hosting work?
For your info, it's good to be aware that the majority of the cPanel hosting offers on today's website hosting market are supplied by a very insignificant business segment (when it comes to yearly cash flow) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller webspace hosting is a sort of a small business segment, which furnishes a great amount of different web hosting brand names, yet providing one and the same solutions: mainly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because at least 98 percent of the site hosting offers on the whole web space hosting marketplace supply precisely the same thing: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based web hosting price tags are identical. Quite identical. Giving those who require a top web hosting service practically no other web page hosting platform/Control Panel choice. Thus, there is just one fact: out of more than 200k web space hosting brands in the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2 percent, mind that one...
200,000 "web site hosting distributors", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely dubbed
The web site hosting "diversity" and the site hosting "offers" Google shows to us come down to merely one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different web site hosting trademarked names. Assume you are simply a normal guy who's not very well aware of (as most of us) with the web page development processes and the web space hosting platforms, which in fact power the different domain names and web sites . Are you ready to make your web hosting choice? Is there any site hosting variant you can settle on? Of course there is, today there are more than 200k web hosting companies in existence. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these more than two hundred thousand unique hosting brands around the world will offer you the same cPanel web space hosting CP and platform, dubbed differently, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how immense the diversity on the contemporary hosting marketplace is... Full stop.
The hosting LOTTO we are all part of
Simple arithmetic demonstrates that to select a non-cPanel based web hosting vendor is a colossal stroke of fortune. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that something like that will take place! Less than 1 in fifty...
The upsides and downsides of the cPanel hosting solution
Let's not be relentless with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and possibly answered most web space hosting market requirements. To cut a long story short, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have only one single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Disadvantage Number 1: An idiotic domain folder setup
If you have 2 or more domain names, however, be extremely careful not to remove completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each new hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domains are quite easy to delete on the hosting server, since they all are set up into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite popular 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 delete the files of the add-on domains, please. Observe for yourself how terrific cPanel's domain name 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)
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 name)
Are you growing bewildered? We absolutely are!
Disadvantage No.2: The very same e-mail folder setup
The electronic mail folder structure on the web server is literally the same as that of the domains... Repeating the same error twice?!? The sysadmin blokes firmly reinforce their faith in God when handling the mail folders on the email server, hoping not to screw things up too fatally.
Disadvantage Number Three: A total absence of domain manipulation GUIs
Do we have to point out the total shortage of a contemporary domain name management user interface - a location where you can: register/move/renew/park or manage domains, change domains' Whois information, shield the Whois details, edit/set up name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not provide such a "contemporary" tool at all. That's a vast shortcoming. An unforgivable one, we want to add...
Disadvantage No.4: Many login locations (min 2, max 3)
What about the necessity for an additional login to access the invoice transaction, domain and tech support administration tool? That's beside the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel-based hosting supplier. Now and then, on the basis of the invoice transaction tool (principally invented for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel web hosting corporation is availing of, the keen customers can end up with 2 extra logins (1: the billing/domain name administration platform; 2: the trouble ticket support platform), winding up with an aggregate of three login locations (counting cPanel).
Downside Number Five: More than one hundred and twenty web space hosting Control Panel departments to get acquainted with... promptly
cPanel offers to your attention 120+ menus inside the site hosting Control Panel. It's a great idea to memorize each one of them. And you'd better pick them up swiftly... That's extremely arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel web page hosting providers:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Note that one too...