cPanel Web Hosting Explanation
For your information, it's useful to know that the majority of the cPanel Web Hosting offers on the present web hosting marketplace are supplied by a very insignificant business niche (when it comes to annual cash flow) named reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small-size marketing niche, which provides an immense number of different web hosting brand names, yet furnishing one and the same services: mostly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because at least 98% of the hosting offers on the entire web hosting market furnish the same thing: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based Web Hosting prices are similar. Quite similar. Leaving for those who require a top web hosting service virtually no other web hosting platform/website hosting CP option. So, there is just one fact: out of more than 200k web hosting trademarks worldwide, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than two percent, mark that one...
200k "Web Hosting corporations", all cPanel-based, yet diversely named
The Web Hosting "diversity" and the hosting "offerings" Google presents to us boil down to just one thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different website hosting trademarked names. Suppose you are just a normal chap who's not very well aware of (as most of us) with the website making processes and the website hosting platforms, which in fact power the different domains and web portals. Are you prepared to make your web hosting selection? Is there any web hosting option you can select? Sure there is, at the moment there are more than 200,000 web hosting service providers in existence. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200,000+ unique web hosting brands around the world will offer you the same cPanel web hosting Control Panel and platform, branded differently, with absolutely the same price tags! WOW! That's how enormous the diversity on today's web hosting market is... Full stop.
The Web Hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in
Simple mathematics demonstrates that to pick a non-cPanel based web hosting vendor is an enormous stroke of luck. There is a less than one in 50 chance that something like that will happen! Less than 1 in fifty...
The strengths and weaknesses of the cPanel-based Web Hosting solution
Let's not be merciless with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and perhaps fulfilled all web hosting industry requirements. 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 domain names...
Negative Side Number One: A ludicrous domain folder structure
If you have 2 or more domain names, however, be ultra careful not to delete fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each subsequent hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domain names are quite easy to remove on the web server, since they all are situated into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the very famous 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 try not to remove the files of the add-on domains, please. Decide for yourself how marvelous cPanel's domain name folder arrangement 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)
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 growing baffled? We surely are!
Negative Sign Number Two: The same email folder system
The mail folder configuration on the hosting server is exactly the same as that of the domains... Repeating the same error twice?!? The admin chaps firmly enhance their belief in God when coping with the e-mail folders on the e-mail server, hoping not to botch things up too harshly.
Shortcoming No.3: A total shortage of domain manipulation sections
Do we have to point out the entire deficiency of a contemporary domain management interface - a place where you can: register/move/renew/park or manage domains, modify domains' Whois details, protect the Whois information, change/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not offer such a "contemporary" user interface at all. That's a big weakness. An unforgivable one, we wish to point out...
Negative Aspect Number Four: Multiple login locations (minimum two, max three)
How about the demand for an extra login to use the billing, domain and tech support administration software? That's apart from the cPanel login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel Web Hosting firm. Occasionally, depending on the billing transaction system (particularly devised for cPanel only) the cPanel Web Hosting corporation is availing of, the earnest customers can end up with two extra login places (1: the invoice transaction/domain name management user interface; 2: the trouble ticket support platform), winding up with an aggregate of three login places (including cPanel).
Disadvantage Number 5: More than 120 web hosting CP sections to become familiar with... quickly
cPanel presents to your attention 120+ areas inside the web hosting CP. It's a glorious idea to grasp each one of them. And you'd better learn them rapidly... That's very impertinent on cPanel's side.
With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based Web Hosting vendors:
As far as we know, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one as well...