How Does cPanel Hosting Work?
For your information, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel website hosting offers on the contemporary web hosting marketplace are provided by a very insignificant marketing segment (when it comes to yearly money flow) named reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a sort of a small-sized business segment, which provides a great number of different web hosting brand names, yet providing literally the same services: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98 percent of the web hosting offers on the whole hosting marketplace furnish the same solution: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based website hosting price tags are identical. Quite similar. Leaving for those who need a top web hosting service practically no other web hosting platform/website hosting Control Panel option. So, there is only one fact: out of more than 200k hosting trademarks worldwide, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2%, note that one...
Two hundred thousand "website hosting vendors", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely labeled
Unlimited bandwidth
1 website hosted
30-Day Free Trial
Unlimited bandwidth
5 websites hosted
30-Day Free Trial
The website hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offerings" Google shows to us come down to merely one and the very same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of thousands of different web hosting trademarked names. Imagine you are merely a regular chap who's not well aware of (as most of us) with the site development procedures and the hosting platforms, which in fact power the individual domain names and sites. Are you ready to make your web hosting selection? Is there any web hosting alternative you can pick? Of course there is, at the moment there are more than 200,000 website hosting companies out there. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ different web hosting brands worldwide will offer you precisely the same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, dubbed differently, with strictly the same price tags! WOW! That's how large the variety on the present web hosting market is... Full stop.
The website hosting LOTTERY we are all part of
Simple math reveals that to choose a non-cPanel based web hosting supplier is a big strike of luck. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that a thing like that will happen! Less than one in fifty...
The positive and negative points of the cPanel website hosting solution
Let's not be harsh with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and perhaps satisfied all web hosting market demands. To put it briefly, cPanel can do the trick if you have only a single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...
Disadvantage No.1: An imbecilic domain folder setup
If you have two or more domains, however, be extremely cautious not to erase entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each subsequent hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domain names are very simple to erase on the server, because they all are created into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very popular public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder located inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domain names, please. Check for yourself how amazing 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 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 name)
Are you getting nonplussed? We unquestionably are!
Weak Point Number Two: The same electronic mail folder system
The e-mail folder configuration on the hosting server is absolutely the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The admin boys firmly fortify their belief in God when tackling the mail folders on the email server, hoping not to screw things up too severely.
Negative Aspect Number Three: A complete lack of domain management menus
Do we need to point out the complete shortage of a contemporary domain administration interface - a location where you can: register/relocate/renew/park or administer domain names, change domains' Whois info, shield the Whois details, modify/set up name servers (DNS) and DNS records? cPanel does not involve such a "modern" GUI at all. That's a gigantic inconvenience. An unpardonable one, we wish to point out...
Negative Sign Number 4: Many login locations (min 2, max 3)
What about the demand for an additional login to avail of the billing, domain and technical support administration GUI? That's apart from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel website hosting firm. Now and then, on the basis of the invoice transaction system (particularly devised for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel website hosting provider is using, the zealous users can wind up with 2 additional logins (1: the billing/domain administration interface; 2: the trouble ticket support GUI), winding up with a total of 3 user login places (including cPanel).
Downside No.5: More than one hundred and twenty web hosting CP departments to become acquainted with... rapidly
cPanel offers for your consideration more than 120 areas inside the CP. It's a remarkable idea to grasp each and every one of them. And you'd better get familiar with them briskly... That's quite impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel website hosting companies:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one as well...