What Indeed is cPanel Website Hosting?

For your info, it's good to know that most of the cPanel-based web hosting offerings on the contemporary hosting marketplace are supplied by a quite inconsiderable business segment (as far as yearly cash flow is concerned) known as reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a type of a small-sized marketing segment, which generates a vast quantity of different web hosting brands, yet offering strictly the same thing: chiefly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because of the fact that at least 98% of the hosting offers on the whole web hosting marketplace provide the very same thing: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based web hosting price tags are identical. Quite similar. Giving those in need of a top web hosting service virtually no other hosting platform/website hosting Control Panel option. Thus, there is only one single fact: out of more than 200k website hosting brand names around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than two percent, note that one...

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

The web hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offerings" Google shows to us come down to just one and the same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different web hosting trademarked names. Suppose you are simply an average chap who's not very well familiar with (as most of us) with the website creation procedures and the hosting platforms, which in fact power the respective domains and web pages. Are you prepared to make your hosting decision? Is there any web hosting variant you can settle on? Sure there is, right now there are more than two hundred thousand website hosting distributors in existence. Formally. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200,000+ different web hosting brand names across the world will give you precisely the same cPanel website hosting CP and platform, branded in a different way, with strictly the same price tags! WOW! That's how immense the variety on the current website hosting market is... Period.

The web hosting LOTTERY we are all part of

Simple mathematics shows that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting distributor is a mammoth stroke of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that an event like that will happen! Less than 1 in 50...

The pluses and minuses of the cPanel-based web hosting solution

Let's not be pitiless with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and possibly covered all web hosting industry prerequisites. In brief, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have just one domain name to host. But, if you have more domain names...

Problem Number One: A stupid domain folder arrangement

If you have two or more domain names, though, be extremely cautious 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 name). The files of the add-on domain names are very easy to delete on the server, since they all are situated into the root folder of the default domain, which is the quite well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain name is a folder located inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domain names, please. Discover for yourself how great cPanel's domain name folder system 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 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 name)

Are you growing nonplussed? We clearly are!

Negative Point Number Two: The very same mail folder arrangement

The mail folder arrangement on the web server is precisely the same as that of the domain names... Making the very same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin chums firmly increase their faith in God when managing the mail folders on the electronic mail server, hoping not to screw things up too irreparably.

Negative Point Number 3: An absolute lack of domain name management menus

Do we need to mention the entire lack of a modern domain administration user interface - a location where you can: register/move/renew/park or administer domains, alter domain names' Whois information, protect the Whois info, change/create nameservers (DNS) and Domain Name System records? cPanel does not contain such a "modern" tool at all. That's a great shortcoming. An unforgivable one, we would like to add...

Negative Point Number Four: Many user login places (minimum two, max 3)

How about the necessity for an additional login to access the invoicing, domain and technical support administration interface? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel-based web hosting distributor. Now and then, depending on the invoicing transaction platform (especially made for cPanel solely) the cPanel web hosting company is using, the devoted clients can end up with 2 extra login places (1: the billing/domain name management menu; 2: the trouble ticket support platform), winding up with an aggregate of 3 user login locations (including cPanel).

Negative Point Number 5: 120+ web hosting CP menus to grasp... quickly

cPanel presents for your consideration more than a hundred and twenty departments inside the website hosting CP. It's a glorious idea to learn each of them. And you'd better grasp them swiftly... That's excessively impudent on cPanel's side.

With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel web hosting suppliers:

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