What Indeed is cPanel Hosting?

For your information, it's good to be aware that the majority of the cPanel hosting offers on the present web hosting marketplace are supplied by a very insignificant business niche (as far as annual cash flow is concerned) named reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small-size marketing niche, which generates a vast number of different web hosting brands, yet providing one and the same thing: mainly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because at least 98% of the web hosting offerings on the entire web hosting marketplace provide literally the same solution: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel hosting price tags are alike. Quite similar. Giving those in need of a top web hosting service almost no other web hosting platform/web hosting Control Panel choice. Thus, there is merely a single fact: out of more than 200,000 website hosting brand names around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2 percent, mind that one...

200k "hosting corporations", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly branded

The hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offers" Google shows to all of us boil down to merely one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different website hosting trademarked names. Imagine you are only an average bloke who's not very well acquainted with (as the majority of us) with the web site creation procedures and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the individual domain names and sites. Are you ready to make your hosting decision? Is there any web hosting variant you can choose? Of course there is, nowadays there are more than two hundred thousand web hosting distributors out there. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these 200,000+ unique website hosting brand names in the world will offer you the very same cPanel website hosting CP and platform, dubbed in a different way, with exactly the same price tags! WOW! That's how immense the assortment on the current website hosting market is... Full stop.

The hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in

Simple arithmetic reveals that to select a non-cPanel based web hosting service provider is a big stroke of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that a thing like that will take place! Less than one in fifty...

The pluses and minuses of the cPanel-based hosting solution

Let's not be cruel with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and possibly answered all hosting business demands. In brief, cPanel can do the job for you if you have just a single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...

Weak Point No.1: A laughable domain folder structure

If you have 2 or more domains, though, be very attentive not to remove fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each subsequent hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domains are very easy to erase on the hosting server, because they all are set up into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very popular public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to erase the files of the add-on domain names, please. Examine for yourself how wonderful cPanel's domain folder structure 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 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 perplexed? We unquestionably are!

Problem Number Two: The same email folder arrangement

The electronic mail folder arrangement on the web hosting server is literally the same as that of the domain names... Making the same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin guys firmly increase their belief in God when tackling the e-mail folders on the mail server, hoping not to mess things up too harshly.

Inconvenience Number Three: A thorough absence of domain administration user interfaces

Do we need to mention the total absence of a contemporary domain administration interface - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or manage domain names, change domain names' Whois info, secure the Whois info, modify/create nameservers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not furnish such a "contemporary" interface at all. That's an enormous downside. An inexcusable one, we would like to add...

Weak Side Number 4: Multiple user login places (min two, max three)

How about the need for an additional login to avail of the invoicing, domain name and tech support management interface? That's apart from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based hosting corporation. At times, depending on the invoicing tool (principally meant for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting supplier is using, the devoted users can wind up with two extra login locations (1: the billing/domain name management system; 2: the ticket support software platform), ending up with an aggregate of 3 login locations (counting cPanel).

Downside No.5: More than one hundred and twenty web hosting Control Panel areas to learn... swiftly

cPanel presents for your consideration more than a hundred and twenty sections inside the hosting CP. It's a remarkable idea to get familiar with each of them. And you'd better get to know them briskly... That's inordinately impudent on cPanel's side.

With all due recognition, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel hosting distributors:

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