What Exactly is cPanel Web Hosting?
For your info, it's useful to know that most of the cPanel-based Web Hosting offerings on the current hosting marketplace are generated by a quite insubstantial business segment (as far as annual capital flow is concerned) dubbed hosting reseller. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small-sized business niche, which furnishes a great quantity of different web hosting brand names, yet supplying exactly the same solutions: chiefly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because at least ninety eight percent of the website hosting offers on the whole web hosting market supply one and the very same solution: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel Web Hosting prices are similar. Quite identical. Leaving for those who demand a top web hosting service practically no other web hosting platform/website hosting CP choice. Thus, there is merely one single fact: out of more than 200k web hosting trademarks all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than two percent, mind that one...
Two hundred thousand "Web Hosting firms", all cPanel-based, yet differently dubbed
The Web Hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offers" Google presents to us boil down to just one and the same solution: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different hosting brand names. Suppose you are just a regular guy who's not well aware of (as the majority of us) with the site creation procedures and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the respective domains and web pages. Are you ready to make your web hosting choice? Is there any web hosting option you can choose? Sure there is, at present there are more than 200k hosting suppliers out there. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ unique website hosting brand names in the world will give you the very same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, named differently, with precisely the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the variety on the current website hosting market is... Full stop.
The Web Hosting LOTTO we are all part of
Simple mathematics reveals that to run into a non-cPanel based web hosting supplier is a great stroke of fortune. There is a less than 1 in fifty chance that a phenomenon like that will happen! Less than one in fifty...
The upsides and downsides of the cPanel-based Web Hosting solution
Let's not be cruel with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and probably covered most web hosting industry requirements. In brief, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only a single domain to host. But, if you have more domain names...
Inconvenience Number 1: An imbecilic domain name folder system
If you have 2 or more domain names, though, be very watchful not to erase completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each next hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domains are very easy to erase on the web hosting server, since they all are located into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the very popular public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder placed inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to erase the files of the add-on domains, please. Verify for yourself how wonderful cPanel's domain name folder configuration 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 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)
Are you getting baffled? We definitely are!
Predicament Number Two: The same mail folder arrangement
The email folder configuration on the hosting server is absolutely the same as that of the domains... Making the very same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin guys firmly reinforce their faith in God when dealing with the mail folders on the email server, praying not to screw things up too irretrievably.
Negative Side No.3: A sheer shortage of domain administration sections
Do we need to refer to the total absence of a modern domain name administration user interface - a location where you can: register/move/renew/park or administer domain names, modify domain names' Whois info, secure the Whois details, alter/create name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not provide such a "modern" interface at all. That's a great shortcoming. An unjustifiable one, we wish to add...
Disadvantage No.4: Numerous user login places (min 2, maximum three)
How about the need for another login to utilize the invoicing, domain name and technical support administration software? That's beside the cPanel account login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel Web Hosting service provider. Occasionally, depending on the billing platform (especially made for cPanel only) the cPanel Web Hosting service provider is utilizing, the eager clients can wind up with two extra login locations (1: the invoice transaction/domain name administration platform; 2: the trouble ticket support user interface), winding up with an aggregate of 3 login locations (counting cPanel).
Disadvantage Number Five: More than one hundred and twenty web hosting Control Panel departments to grasp... swiftly
cPanel presents for your consideration more than one hundred and twenty areas inside the web hosting Control Panel. It's a fantastic idea to pick up each of them. And you'd better memorize them promptly... That's extremely arrogant on cPanel's side.
With all due appreciation, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based Web Hosting corporations:
As far as we are aware of, it's not the year 2001, is it? Remark that one too...
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