What Indeed is cPanel Website Hosting?

For your info, it's useful to know that the majority of the cPanel hosting offers on today's web hosting marketplace are generated by a quite insubstantial marketing niche (as far as yearly cash flow is concerned) called reseller hosting. Reseller website hosting is a sort of a small-sized marketing niche, which provides a huge number of different web hosting trademarks, yet supplying literally the same services: mainly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98% of the web hosting offers on the entire website hosting marketplace provide exactly the same solution: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting price tags are alike. Quite similar. Leaving for those who need a top web hosting service virtually no other web hosting platform/web hosting Control Panel choice. So, there is simply a single fact: out of more than 200,000 web hosting brand names around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2%, mind that one...

200,000 "hosting distributors", all cPanel-based, yet differently labeled

The hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offers" Google shows to all of us boil down to just one thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different web hosting trademarked names. Suppose you are simply a regular person who's not very well familiar with (as most of us) with the web page making procedures and the web hosting platforms, which actually power the different domain names and web portals. Are you prepared to make your web hosting choice? Is there any web hosting option you can pick? Sure there is, nowadays there are more than 200k website hosting suppliers out there. Formally. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98 percent of these more than two hundred thousand unique web hosting brands across the world will offer you precisely the same cPanel website hosting CP and platform, branded differently, with precisely the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the variety on the present website hosting market is... Full stop.

The hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in

Simple math reveals that to chance upon a non-cPanel based web hosting corporation is a great stroke of fortune. There is a less than one in fifty chance that something like that will take place! Less than 1 in fifty...

The strong and weak points of the cPanel hosting solution

Let's not be merciless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and presumably met all website hosting market preconditions. To put it briefly, cPanel can do the trick if you have only one single domain name to host. But, if you have more domain names...

Disadvantage No.1: A dumb domain folder structure

If you have two or more domain names, though, be extremely attentive not to erase fully 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). The files of the add-on domains are very simple to remove on the web server, since they all are located into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very famous 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 attempt not to remove the files of the add-on domains, please. See for yourself how fantastic cPanel's domain folder setup 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)
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 growing confused? We unquestionably are!

Negative Aspect No.2: The same mail folder configuration

The e-mail folder structure on the web server is literally the same as that of the domains... Making the very same error twice?!? The sysadmin chaps firmly reinforce their belief in God when coping with the e-mail folders on the mail server, praying not to screw things up too fatally.

Weak Point Number Three: An utter absence of domain administration interfaces

Do we have to mention the absolute lack of a modern domain management platform - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or manage domains, alter domain names' Whois information, secure the Whois info, change/set up name servers (DNS) and Domain Name System resource records? cPanel does not include such a "modern" interface at all. That's an immense shortcoming. An inexcusable one, we wish to add...

Predicament No.4: Numerous user login locations (min two, max three)

What about the need for an additional login to use the invoice transaction, domain name and technical support management menu? That's apart from the cPanel login credentials you've been already provided by the cPanel-based hosting corporation. Occasionally, on the basis of the invoice transaction tool (particularly conceived for cPanel only) the cPanel hosting supplier is availing of, the avid users can end up with 2 additional login places (1: the billing/domain management GUI; 2: the ticket support software platform), ending up with a total of 3 login locations (counting cPanel).

Negative Side No.5: 120+ web hosting CP sections to memorize... briskly

cPanel presents for your consideration more than a hundred and twenty areas inside the Control Panel. It's a fantastic idea to become acquainted with each of them. And you'd better pick them up fast... That's excessively arrogant on cPanel's side.

With all due respect, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel-based hosting distributors:

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