How does cpanel-based site hosting work?

For your information, it's good to be aware that the majority of the cPanel-based web space hosting offers on the present-day webspace hosting marketplace are provided by a quite insignificant marketing niche (when it comes to annual cash flow) dubbed hosting reseller. Reseller web hosting is a kind of a small-sized marketing segment, which provides an immense amount of different web hosting brand names, yet providing exactly the same thing: mostly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Because of the fact that at least 98% of the web hosting offers on the whole web hosting marketplace provide exactly the same thing: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel website hosting price tags are similar. Quite similar. Leaving for those who demand a top web hosting service virtually no other website hosting platform/CP option. So, there is only one single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand hosting trademarks around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than two percent, mark that one...

200,000 "hosting providers", all cPanel-based, yet differently named

The hosting "diversity" and the web site hosting "offerings" Google shows to us boil down to merely one solution: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different site hosting trademarked names. Imagine you are only an ordinary fellow who's not very well acquainted with (as most of us) with the site development processes and the web page hosting platforms, which actually power the separate domain names and web portals . Are you prepared to make your hosting selection? Is there any web hosting alternative you can pick? Of course there is, now there are more than 200,000 web site hosting service providers out there. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200,000+ different web space hosting brand names all over the world will offer you the same cPanel hosting Control Panel and platform, dubbed in a different way, with precisely the same price tags! WOW! That's how great the diversity on the present-day web page hosting marketplace is... Period.

The hosting LOTTO we are all part of

Simple mathematics shows that to chance upon a non-cPanel based web hosting provider is a big strike of luck. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that something like that will occur! Less than 1 in 50...

The strengths and weaknesses of the cPanel-based web site hosting solution

Let's not be pitiless with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and probably satisfied most site hosting business preconditions. In brief, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have only a single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...

Problem Number 1: A laughable domain name folder structure

If you have two or more domain names, though, be ultra cautious not to remove entirely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will dub each next hosted domain name, which is not the default one: an add-on domain). The files of the add-on domain names are very easy to delete on the hosting server, since they all are created into the root folder of the default domain, which is the very popular public_html folder. Each add-on domain is a folder located inside the folder of the default domain. Like a sub-folder. Next time try not to remove the files of the add-on domains, please. Verify for yourself how amazing cPanel's domain name folder structure 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 name)
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 becoming confused? We definitely are!

Drawback Number Two: The very same e-mail folder arrangement

The email folder structure on the web server is absolutely the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The admin blokes firmly reinforce their faith in God when coping with the mail folders on the mail server, praying not to muck things up too irreparably.

Negative Sign Number Three: An utter absence of domain administration interfaces

Do we need to bring up the absolute deficiency of a contemporary domain management tool - a location where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or administer domains, change domains' Whois information, protect the Whois information, change/set up nameservers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not furnish such a "modern" menu at all. That's a great downside. An unpardonable one, we would like to add...

Weakness No.4: Multiple user login places (minimum two, max 3)

How about the need for another login to utilize the billing transaction, domain and technical support management system? That's aside from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel web hosting firm. Occasionally, based on the billing system (especially devised for cPanel only) the cPanel web hosting firm is utilizing, the keen users can wind up with 2 extra login locations (1: the invoice transaction/domain name administration menu; 2: the trouble ticket support interface), winding up with an aggregate of three user login locations (counting cPanel).

Drawback Number 5: More than 120 Control Panel sections to get to know... quickly

cPanel presents for your consideration more than a hundred and twenty menus inside the hosting Control Panel. It's a fantastic idea to grasp each of them. And you'd better get to know them rapidly... That's inordinately impudent on cPanel's side.

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

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