How does cpanel-based web site hosting function?
For your information, it's useful to know that the majority of the cPanel-based web space hosting offers on the contemporary hosting marketplace are supplied by a quite unsubstantial marketing niche (as far as yearly cash flow is concerned) called hosting reseller. Reseller web site hosting is a kind of a small-sized business niche, which provides a vast quantity of different web hosting trademarks, yet providing exactly the same thing: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because at least 98% of the hosting offers on the entire web page hosting market furnish the same service: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel-based web hosting price tags are alike. Quite identical. Giving those who demand a top web hosting service practically no other website hosting platform/Control Panel option. Thus, there is merely one fact: out of more than 200k website hosting brand names around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than two percent, note that one...
200k "web space hosting vendors", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly dubbed
The hosting "variety" and the web page hosting "offers" Google reveals to all of us boil down to just one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different web page hosting brand names. Suppose you are simply a regular fellow who's not very well familiar with (as the majority of us) with the web page development processes and the web page hosting platforms, which actually power the separate domain names and web portals . Are you prepared to make your web hosting decision? Is there any web site hosting alternative you can decide upon? Of course there is, nowadays there are more than 200k website hosting corporations out there. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these more than two hundred thousand unique web hosting brand names around the world will give you the same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, named differently, with exactly the same price tags! WOW! That's how enormous the variety on the present hosting market is... Period.
The site hosting LOTTERY we are all paricipating in
Simple mathematics shows that to pick a non-cPanel based web hosting vendor is a big stroke of luck. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that a thing like that will take place! Less than 1 in fifty...
The positive and negative points of the cPanel website hosting solution
Let's not be pitiless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modern and presumably met all website hosting industry preconditions. To cut a long story short, cPanel can do the trick if you have only one single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Weak Side Number 1: A ludicrous domain name folder arrangement
If you have 2 or more domains, however, be extra cautious not to erase completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each next hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are very easy to remove on the hosting server, because they all are placed into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite popular public_html folder. Each add-on domain name is a folder placed inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to delete the files of the add-on domains, please. Determine for yourself how great cPanel's domain name folder structure 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)
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)
Are you getting baffled? We certainly are!
Downside Number 2: The same electronic mail folder system
The email folder structure on the web server is precisely the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin guys firmly strengthen their belief in God when coping with the e-mail folders on the e-mail server, hoping not to muck things up too irreparably.
Weak Point Number 3: An absolute deficiency of domain name management user interfaces
Do we need to point out the absolute deficiency of a modern domain manipulation tool - a location where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or manage domain names, change domains' Whois info, shield the Whois info, change/set up nameservers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not furnish such a "modern" menu at all. That's an enormous weakness. An inexcusable one, we wish to add...
Shortcoming No.4: Multiple login locations (minimum two, maximum 3)
What about the necessity for an extra login to utilize the invoicing, domain and technical support management menu? That's apart from the cPanel login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel website hosting corporation. Sometimes, on the basis of the invoicing tool (especially created for cPanel solely) the cPanel web hosting supplier is utilizing, the devoted clients can end up with two extra logins (1: the billing/domain management system; 2: the trouble ticket support tool), ending up with a total of 3 user login locations (counting cPanel).
Weak Point No.5: More than a hundred and twenty web space hosting Control Panel areas to become acquainted with... rapidly
cPanel offers for your consideration 120+ sections inside the web site hosting CP. It's a fantastic idea to become familiar with each of them. And you'd better become acquainted with them promptly... That's way too impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due recognition, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based hosting suppliers:
As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one too...