How does cpanel web site hosting operate?
For your information, it's good to be aware that the majority of the cPanel web page hosting offers on today's web hosting marketplace are furnished by a quite insignificant marketing niche (as far as annual capital flow is concerned) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller site hosting is a kind of a small-scale business niche, which provides an immense number of different web hosting brand names, yet furnishing absolutely the same services: mainly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98% of the web space hosting offerings on the entire hosting market provide literally the same thing: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel web page hosting price tags are alike. Quite similar. Giving those who require a top web hosting service virtually no other website hosting platform/web site hosting Control Panel option. So, there is merely a single fact: out of more than 200k web page hosting brand names all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2, mark that one...
200,000 "webspace hosting service providers", all cPanel-based, yet diversely labeled
The web site hosting "diversity" and the website hosting "offerings" Google reveals to all of us boil down to just one solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different website hosting brand names. Imagine you are simply a normal person who's not very well familiar with (as most of us) with the web page making procedures and the web hosting platforms, which in fact power the separate domain names and web pages . Are you prepared to make your hosting decision? Is there any website hosting alternative you can opt for? Of course there is, as of now there are more than two hundred thousand website hosting providers out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these 200k+ unique website hosting brands worldwide will offer you strictly the same cPanel site hosting Control Panel and platform, dubbed differently, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the variety on the present-day site hosting marketplace is... Full stop.
The web space hosting LOTTO we are all paricipating in
Simple arithmetic reveals that to run into a non-cPanel based web hosting distributor is a great strike of luck. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that a thing like that will happen! Less than one in fifty...
The upsides and downsides of the cPanel-based hosting solution
Let's not be unfair with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and presumably met all web page hosting industry preconditions. In brief, cPanel can do the trick if you have just one domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...
Problem No.1: A dumb domain name folder configuration
If you have two or more domains, however, be very careful not to erase 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 domain names are quite simple to erase on the web hosting server, since they all are situated 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 name. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to delete the files of the add-on domains, please. Examine for yourself how good cPanel's domain name folder setup 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)
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 getting perplexed? We surely are!
Weakness No.2: The same mail folder arrangement
The electronic mail folder structure on the web hosting server is strictly the same as that of the domain names... Making the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin chaps firmly reinforce their belief in God when handling the email folders on the electronic mail server, praying not to fuck things up too fatally.
Downside Number Three: An utter deficiency of domain management options
Do we need to refer to the sheer lack of a contemporary domain name administration GUI - a location where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or manage domain names, change domains' Whois info, shield the Whois information, modify/create nameservers (DNS) and DNS records? cPanel does not incorporate such a "modern" section at all. That's a vast inconvenience. An unjustifiable one, we would like to add...
Negative Point Number 4: Many user login places (minimum 2, max three)
What about the necessity for another login to avail of the invoicing transaction, domain name and technical support management platform? That's apart from the cPanel login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel web site hosting distributor. Sometimes, on the basis of the invoicing transaction platform (principally developed for cPanel only) the cPanel web hosting supplier is making use of, the zealous customers can wind up with 2 additional login places (1: the billing transaction/domain administration menu; 2: the ticket support menu), ending up with an aggregate of three user login locations (counting cPanel).
Negative Aspect Number Five: 120+ web page hosting CP areas to get to know... fast
cPanel offers to your attention more than a hundred and twenty areas inside the web page hosting CP. It's a glorious idea to memorize each of them. And you'd better learn them briskly... That's way too impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel site hosting service providers:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one too...