What Actually is cPanel Hosting?

For your information, it's good to know that most of the cPanel-based web hosting offers on the present web hosting marketplace are generated by a quite insubstantial business segment (when it comes to yearly cash flow) dubbed hosting reseller. Reseller website hosting is a kind of a small-scale business niche, which supplies a huge number of different web hosting trademarks, yet furnishing precisely the same solutions: chiefly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because of the fact that at least ninety eight percent of the web hosting offerings on the whole web hosting market furnish strictly the same solution: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel web hosting price tags are identical. Very similar. Giving those who require a top web hosting service virtually no other web hosting platform/web hosting Control Panel option. Thus, there is only one single fact: out of more than 200,000 web hosting brands around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2%, mind that one...

200k "web hosting companies", all cPanel-based, yet differently named

The web hosting "diversity" and the website hosting "offerings" Google shows to us come down to just one and the very same solution: cPanel. Under hundreds of 1000's of different web hosting brand names. Imagine you are merely an ordinary chap who's not very well familiar with (as most of us) with the site creation procedures and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the respective domain names and web pages. Are you prepared to make your hosting pick? Is there any web hosting alternative you can select? Sure there is, at the moment there are more than 200k web hosting service providers out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ different web hosting brand names around the world will give you strictly the same cPanel website hosting Control Panel and platform, branded in a different way, with precisely the same price tags! WOW! That's how enormous the variety on today's website hosting marketplace is... Full stop.

The web hosting LOTTERY we are all part of

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

The positive and negative sides of the cPanel web hosting solution

Let's not be merciless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modern and probably satisfied most web hosting market requirements. In brief, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only one single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...

Downside Number One: An idiotic domain name folder configuration

If you have two or more domains, however, be extra attentive not to delete fully 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 domain names are very simple to remove on the web hosting server, because they all are created into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the quite well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder situated inside the folder of the default domain name. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domains, please. Check for yourself how fantastic cPanel's domain name folder configuration is:

public_html (here my-default-domain.com is situated)
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 name)
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)

Are you becoming confused? We surely are!

Problem Number 2: The same email folder structure

The e-mail folder structure on the web server is precisely the same as that of the domains... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin chums strongly fortify their faith in God when managing the e-mail folders on the email server, praying not to screw things up too irreparably.

Disadvantage No.3: An utter deficiency of domain name management user interfaces

Do we need to mention the absolute lack of a contemporary domain administration GUI - a location where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or administer domain names, change domain names' Whois information, protect the Whois info, edit/create name servers (DNS) and DNS records? cPanel does not offer such a "contemporary" GUI at all. That's a gigantic drawback. An unjustifiable one, we would like to add...

Predicament Number 4: Multiple user login places (min two, maximum 3)

What about the demand for an additional login to make use of the billing, domain name and technical support administration software? That's aside from the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel-based web hosting supplier. Sometimes, based on the invoice transaction platform (especially developed for cPanel solely) the cPanel web hosting vendor is making use of, the avid customers can end up with two additional login places (1: the invoicing transaction/domain name management software solution; 2: the ticket support tool), ending up with an aggregate of 3 user login locations (including cPanel).

Weak Side Number 5: More than a hundred and twenty web hosting Control Panel menus to get acquainted with... briskly

cPanel presents to your attention 120+ departments inside the hosting CP. It's an excellent idea to get to know each one of them. And you'd better get familiar with them rapidly... That's inordinately arrogant on cPanel's side.

With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel web hosting companies:

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