How Does cPanel Hosting Operate?

For your info, it's good to be aware that the majority of the cPanel hosting offers on the present-day hosting market are furnished by a quite insubstantial marketing niche (as far as annual money flow is concerned) named reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small-size business segment, which provides a big number of different web hosting trademarks, yet providing precisely the same services: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98% of the web hosting offers on the whole web hosting marketplace offer the very same thing: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel hosting price tags are alike. Very identical. Leaving for those who need a top web hosting service virtually no other website hosting platform/web hosting Control Panel option. So, there is just one single fact: out of more than 200,000 web hosting brands worldwide, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2%, mind that one...

Two hundred thousand "hosting providers", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely dubbed

The hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offers" Google reveals to all of us boil down to just one thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different website hosting trademarked names. Assume you are simply a regular bloke who's not well aware of (as the majority of us) with the web page creation procedures and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the various domains and web sites. Are you ready to make your hosting selection? Is there any web hosting option you can choose? Of course there is, right now there are more than 200k website hosting companies out there. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200,000+ unique web hosting brands all over the world will give you the same cPanel web hosting Control Panel and platform, branded differently, with strictly the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the assortment on the present web hosting market is... Period.

The hosting LOTTO we are all part of

Simple arithmetic reveals that to choose a non-cPanel based web hosting firm is a great stroke of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that a thing like that will happen! Less than one in 50...

The strong and weak sides of the cPanel-based hosting solution

Let's not be severe with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and probably satisfied most web hosting market demands. To cut a long story short, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have just a single domain to host. But, if you have more domain names...

Shortcoming No.1: A laughable domain name folder arrangement

If you have 2 or more domains, however, be extra attentive not to delete entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each next hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are quite simple to erase on the web hosting server, because they all are located 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 try not to remove the files of the add-on domains, please. Determine for yourself how fantastic 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 name)
public_html/my-third-domain.com (an add-on domain name)
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 getting baffled? We definitely are!

Weak Point No.2: The very same electronic mail folder system

The email folder arrangement on the web server is literally the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the same error twice?!? The sysadmin chaps strongly reinforce their faith in God when tackling the mail folders on the mail server, praying not to muck things up too irreparably.

Weakness No.3: An utter shortage of domain manipulation sections

Do we have to refer to the utter lack of a contemporary domain administration user interface - a location where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or administer domain names, alter domain names' Whois information, protect the Whois information, modify/create name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not provide such a "modern" user interface at all. That's a big predicament. An unpardonable one, we would like to point out...

Negative Aspect Number 4: Multiple user login places (minimum two, max three)

How about the demand for an additional login to access the invoicing transaction, domain name and tech support administration software? That's aside from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel hosting service provider. Occasionally, on the basis of the invoicing system (principally meant for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting vendor is utilizing, the eager users can wind up with two extra login locations (1: the invoicing transaction/domain administration software solution; 2: the trouble ticket support GUI), winding up with a total of 3 user login places (counting cPanel).

Drawback Number 5: More than a hundred and twenty website hosting CP sections to memorize... swiftly

cPanel offers to your attention more than a hundred and twenty sections inside the web hosting CP. It's a fantastic idea to get familiar with each of them. And you'd better memorize them fast... That's excessively impudent on cPanel's side.

With all due recognition, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based hosting providers:

As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one too...