What is cPanel Hosting?

For your info, it's useful to know that the majority of the cPanel-based hosting offers on the present website hosting market are provided by a very insubstantial marketing segment (when it comes to annual cash flow) called hosting reseller. Reseller website hosting is a type of a small-scale business niche, which generates a huge number of different web hosting brands, yet offering exactly 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 marketplace supply absolutely the same solution: cPanel. There's no diversity at all. Even the cPanel-based hosting prices are identical. Very much alike. Giving those who require a top web hosting service virtually no other web hosting platform/website hosting CP option. So, there is merely a single fact: out of more than 200k web hosting brand names all over the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2%! Less than two percent, remark that one...

200,000 "hosting service providers", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly labeled

The hosting "diversity" and the web hosting "offerings" Google presents to all of us come down to merely one and the same thing: cPanel. Under 100's of 1000's of different web hosting trademarked names. Imagine you are only a normal bloke who's not very well familiar with (as the majority of us) with the web site making procedures and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the respective domain names and web portals. Are you ready to make your hosting decision? Is there any web hosting alternative you can opt for? Of course there is, nowadays there are more than two hundred thousand website hosting vendors in existence. Officially. Then where is the problem? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ different hosting brands all over the world will give you the very same cPanel Control Panel and platform, dubbed in a different way, with the same price tags! WOW! That's how enormous the diversity on today's web hosting marketplace is... Full stop.

The hosting LOTTO we are all participating in

Simple arithmetic reveals that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting supplier is a colossal stroke of luck. There is a less than 1 in 50 chance that something like that will take place! Less than one in 50...

The upsides and downsides of the cPanel-based hosting solution

Let's not be unfair with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was trendy and presumably fulfilled most hosting industry preconditions. In short, cPanel can do the trick if you have only one domain name to host. But, if you have more domain names...

Negative Point No.1: A moronic domain folder structure

If you have 2 or more domains, however, be very watchful not to delete completely the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call 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 erase on the hosting server, since they all are located into the root folder of the default domain name, which is the very well known public_html folder. Each add-on domain name is a folder situated 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. Decide for yourself how amazing cPanel's domain name folder configuration 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 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)
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 growing baffled? We certainly are!

Weakness No.2: The same email folder structure

The email folder structure on the server is exactly the same as that of the domains... Making the very same mistake twice?!? The sysadmin guys firmly enhance their faith in God when managing the electronic mail folders on the email server, praying not to screw things up too seriously.

Predicament Number Three: A total lack of domain administration tools

Do we need to bring up the thorough absence of a modern domain administration interface - a location where you can: register/migrate/renew/park or manage domains, change domain names' Whois information, shield the Whois info, change/create name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not furnish such a "contemporary" menu at all. That's a big shortcoming. An unforgivable one, we want to add...

Negative Point Number Four: Multiple login locations (min two, maximum three)

What about the necessity for another login to utilize the invoicing transaction, domain name and technical support administration system? That's beside the cPanel login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel-based hosting provider. Now and then, depending on the billing transaction system (particularly created for cPanel solely) the cPanel hosting vendor is availing of, the earnest customers can end up with two extra login places (1: the invoicing transaction/domain management platform; 2: the ticket support interface), ending up with a total of 3 login places (counting cPanel).

Negative Sign Number Five: More than one hundred and twenty web hosting Control Panel areas to become familiar with... rapidly

cPanel offers to your attention more than a hundred and twenty menus inside the web hosting CP. It's a fantastic idea to learn each and every one of them. And you'd better get acquainted with them fast... That's way too impertinent on cPanel's side.

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

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