How Does cPanel Hosting Work?

For your information, it's good to be aware that most of the cPanel-based hosting offers on the present hosting market are supplied by a very insubstantial marketing niche (when it comes to yearly cash flow) dubbed reseller hosting. Reseller web hosting is a kind of a small marketing segment, which generates a vast quantity of different web hosting brands, yet furnishing strictly the same services: chiefly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everybody. Why? Owing to the fact that at least 98 percent of the web hosting offerings on the entire web hosting market offer the very same solution: cPanel. There's no difference at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting price tags are alike. Very much alike. Leaving for those who require a top web hosting service virtually no other hosting platform/web hosting Control Panel alternative. So, there is simply one single fact: out of more than 200k website hosting brand names all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than two percent! Less than 2 percent, mind that one...

200k "hosting distributors", all cPanel-based, yet uniquely labeled

The hosting "diversity" and the website hosting "offers" Google reveals to us come down to just one solution: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different web hosting trademarked names. Imagine you are merely a regular fellow who's not very well familiar with (as the majority of us) with the site making processes and the web hosting platforms, which in fact power the different domain names and web sites. Are you prepared to make your hosting decision? Is there any web hosting variant you can choose? Sure there is, as of now there are more than two hundred thousand website hosting corporations out there. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than ninety eight percent of these more than two hundred thousand different website hosting brands all over the world will give you literally the same cPanel Control Panel and platform, dubbed differently, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how great the variety on the present web hosting market is... Period.

The hosting LOTTO we are all part of

Simple mathematics shows that to pick a non-cPanel based web hosting firm is an immense stroke of fortune. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that something like that will happen! Less than 1 in fifty...

The pluses and minuses of the cPanel hosting solution

Let's not be unfair with cPanel. After all, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was fashionable and perhaps covered all hosting business prerequisites. To put it briefly, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have just one single domain to host. But, if you have more domains...

Downside Number 1: An imbecilic domain name folder structure

If you have 2 or more domain names, though, be extra watchful not to remove fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will refer to each new 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 delete on the web server, because they all are located into the root folder of the default domain, which is the quite famous 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 try not to remove the files of the add-on domain names, please. Discover for yourself how good cPanel's domain name folder system 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)
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 perplexed? We positively are!

Negative Aspect Number Two: The same email folder system

The electronic mail folder configuration on the web server is absolutely the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the very same error twice?!? The admin chums firmly reinforce their faith in God when tackling the e-mail folders on the e-mail server, hoping not to bungle things up too gravely.

Problem Number 3: A thorough absence of domain administration GUIs

Do we have to mention the thorough shortage of a contemporary domain name manipulation GUI - a place where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or administer domains, edit domains' Whois info, shield the Whois information, change/set up name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not include such a "contemporary" section at all. That's a considerable problem. An unpardonable one, we want to point out...

Shortcoming Number 4: Many login places (minimum 2, max 3)

What about the demand for another login to access the invoice transaction, domain name and tech support administration software platform? That's apart from the cPanel account login credentials you've been already given by the cPanel hosting provider. At times, depending on the invoice transaction platform (especially built for cPanel solely) the cPanel hosting vendor is using, the ardent clients can end up with two extra login locations (1: the invoicing/domain name administration platform; 2: the trouble ticket support software solution), winding up with a total of 3 login locations (counting cPanel).

Negative Aspect Number 5: More than one hundred and twenty website hosting Control Panel menus to grasp... briskly

cPanel presents to your attention more than 120 sections inside the hosting Control Panel. It's a marvelous idea to grasp each and every one of them. And you'd better get to know them rapidly... That's inordinately impertinent on cPanel's side.

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

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