cPanel Website Hosting Unmasked

For your info, it's good to be aware that most of the cPanel hosting offers on today's hosting marketplace are provided by a very insubstantial business segment (when it comes to yearly money flow) named reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a sort of a small marketing niche, which provides an immense quantity of different web hosting trademarks, yet offering the very same services: mostly cPanel web hosting services. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98 percent of the website hosting offers on the entire web hosting marketplace supply one and the very same solution: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting prices are alike. Quite similar. Giving those who demand a top web hosting service almost no other web hosting platform/website hosting Control Panel choice. Thus, there is just a single fact: out of more than 200k web hosting trademarks around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2 percent, note that one...

200,000 "hosting service providers", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely dubbed

The hosting "variety" and the web hosting "offerings" Google shows to us boil down to merely one and the very same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different web hosting brand names. Assume you are only a normal guy who's not very well familiar with (as most of us) with the website development procedures and the web hosting platforms, which in fact power the different domain names and web portals. Are you prepared to make your web hosting pick? Is there any website hosting variant you can decide upon? Of course there is, right now there are more than 200,000 website hosting suppliers out there. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these 200,000+ different website hosting brand names worldwide will offer you exactly the same cPanel CP and platform, branded in a different way, with strictly the same price tags! WOW! That's how large the diversity on the present-day web hosting market is... Period.

The hosting LOTTERY we are all part of

Simple arithmetic shows that to chance upon a non-cPanel based web hosting supplier is a great strike of luck. There is a less than one in 50 chance that a phenomenon like that will take place! Less than one in 50...

The positive and negative aspects of the cPanel-based hosting solution

Let's not be relentless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and possibly met most web hosting market requirements. In short, cPanel can do the job for you if you have only one single domain name to host. But, if you have more domains...

Drawback Number One: A dumb domain folder system

If you have two or more domains, though, be extra careful not to erase completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each new hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domains are very easy to delete on the hosting server, since they all are placed 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. Like a sub-folder. Next time attempt not to delete the files of the add-on domain names, please. Check for yourself how wonderful cPanel's domain folder structure 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 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)
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 puzzled? We surely are!

Weak Point Number 2: The very same mail folder arrangement

The electronic mail folder configuration on the hosting server is exactly the same as that of the domain names... Making the same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin chums strongly increase their belief in God when coping with the e-mail folders on the email server, praying not to mess things up too badly.

Problem Number 3: An absolute shortage of domain name management user interfaces

Do we need to mention the thorough shortage of a modern domain administration menu - a place where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or administer domain names, alter domain names' Whois info, protect the Whois info, alter/set up nameservers (DNS) and DNS records? cPanel does not incorporate such a "modern" GUI at all. That's a major shortcoming. An inexcusable one, we wish to point out...

Inconvenience Number Four: Numerous login locations (minimum two, max 3)

How about the need for another login to use the billing transaction, domain and technical support administration software? That's aside from the cPanel login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel-based hosting company. At times, depending on the billing system (particularly created for cPanel exclusively) the cPanel hosting company is making use of, the keen users can end up with 2 extra login places (1: the invoicing transaction/domain management tool; 2: the trouble ticket support user interface), ending up with a total of three user login locations (counting cPanel).

Inconvenience Number 5: More than a hundred and twenty web hosting CP sections to get to know... briskly

cPanel presents to your attention 120+ sections inside the web hosting CP. It's a wonderful idea to learn each and every one of them. And you'd better become acquainted with them quickly... That's inordinately impudent on cPanel's side.

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

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