cPanel Hosting Explained

For your info, it's useful to be aware that the majority of the cPanel-based hosting offerings on today's website hosting marketplace are provided by a very insubstantial marketing niche (as far as yearly cash flow is concerned) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller hosting is a type of a small-sized business segment, which generates a big quantity of different web hosting brand names, yet supplying precisely the same solutions: mainly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Due to the fact that at least 98% of the website hosting offerings on the whole website hosting marketplace provide one and the same thing: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting prices are similar. Quite similar. Leaving for those who need a top web hosting service virtually no other website hosting platform/CP option. So, there is only one single fact: out of more than 200,000 web hosting brand names worldwide, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than two percent, mark that one...

200,000 "hosting corporations", all cPanel-based, yet diversely labeled

The hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offers" Google shows to all of us come down to merely one and the same solution: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different web hosting brand names. Assume you are simply an ordinary guy who's not very well acquainted with (as most of us) with the site making processes and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the separate domain names and web pages. Are you ready to make your web hosting pick? Is there any hosting option you can choose? Sure there is, these days there are more than two hundred thousand website hosting vendors in existence. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200,000+ different web hosting brands in the world will offer you literally the same cPanel web hosting Control Panel and platform, branded in a different way, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how great the diversity on the contemporary web hosting marketplace is... Period.

The hosting LOTTERY we are all part of

Simple math shows that to select a non-cPanel based web hosting corporation is an enormous stroke of fortune. There is a less than one in 50 chance that a thing like that will occur! Less than 1 in fifty...

The pluses and minuses of the cPanel hosting solution

Let's not be severe with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and perhaps fulfilled most web hosting business prerequisites. To cut a long story short, cPanel can do the job for you if you have just a single domain to host. But, if you have more domain names...

Negative Sign Number 1: A ludicrous domain name folder structure

If you have two or more domain names, though, be extra attentive not to delete completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each next 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 remove on the web server, since they all are set up into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the very popular public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder located inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to remove the files of the add-on domains, please. Decide for yourself how wonderful cPanel's domain 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 name)

Are you becoming puzzled? We unquestionably are!

Drawback Number Two: The very same e-mail folder arrangement

The e-mail folder configuration on the web server is exactly the same as that of the domain names... Making the very same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin chaps strongly enhance their belief in God when dealing with the mail folders on the mail server, hoping not to screw things up too harshly.

Weakness Number 3: A total absence of domain manipulation GUIs

Do we need to refer to the absolute shortage of a contemporary domain name administration GUI - a place where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or administer domains, alter domains' Whois info, secure the Whois information, edit/set up name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not have such a "modern" menu at all. That's a great disadvantage. An unjustifiable one, we want to add...

Predicament Number Four: Many user login locations (min 2, max three)

How about the need for another login to avail of the billing transaction, domain name and technical support management GUI? That's aside from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel hosting distributor. Sometimes, depending on the billing platform (principally meant for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel hosting corporation is availing of, the zealous customers can end up with 2 extra logins (1: the invoice transaction/domain name administration software; 2: the trouble ticket support GUI), winding up with an aggregate of three login places (counting cPanel).

Problem Number 5: More than 120 website hosting CP menus to get to know... rapidly

cPanel presents to your attention more than a hundred and twenty areas inside the hosting Control Panel. It's an excellent idea to grasp each of them. And you'd better memorize them swiftly... That's inordinately impertinent on cPanel's side.

With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting service providers:

As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mind that one too...