How cPanel Web Hosting Works
For your information, it's useful to know that the majority of the cPanel-based Web Hosting offers on the present website hosting marketplace are furnished by a very insubstantial marketing segment (as far as annual cash flow is concerned) named reseller hosting. Reseller hosting is a kind of a small-size marketing segment, which generates a big quantity of different web hosting brands, yet providing exactly the same services: chiefly cPanel web hosting solutions. This is bad news for everyone. Why? Because at least 98% of the web hosting offerings on the entire web hosting marketplace supply precisely the same solution: cPanel. There's no variety at all. Even the cPanel-based Web Hosting prices are identical. Quite identical. Leaving for those in need of a top web hosting service almost no other website hosting platform/hosting CP option. So, there is simply one single fact: out of more than two hundred thousand web hosting brand names around the world, the non-cPanel based ones are less than 2 percent! Less than 2%, mind that one...
200k "Web Hosting service providers", all cPanel-based, yet distinctly labeled
The Web Hosting "variety" and the website hosting "offerings" Google presents to us come down to merely one thing: cPanel. Under 100's of thousands of different web hosting trademarked names. Suppose you are simply an ordinary chap who's not very familiar with (as the majority of us) with the website making processes and the website hosting platforms, which actually power the various domain names and websites. Are you prepared to make your hosting selection? Is there any web hosting variant you can select? Sure there is, nowadays there are more than 200,000 hosting vendors in existence. Officially. Then where is the difficulty? Here's where: more than 98% of these 200k+ unique web hosting brand names around the world will give you strictly the same cPanel web hosting CP and platform, named in a different way, with strictly the same price tags! WOW! That's how huge the diversity on the current website hosting market is... Period.
The Web Hosting LOTTERY we are all participating in
Simple mathematics shows that to encounter a non-cPanel based web hosting supplier is a huge stroke of luck. There is a less than one in fifty chance that an event like that will occur! Less than 1 in fifty...
The upsides and downsides of the cPanel Web Hosting solution
Let's not be merciless with cPanel. At least, in the years 2001-2004 cPanel was modish and possibly met all hosting market preconditions. To put it briefly, cPanel can achieve the desired result if you have only one single domain name to host. But, if you have more domain names...
Weakness No.1: A moronic domain name folder system
If you have 2 or more domain names, however, be ultra watchful not to remove fully the add-on ones (that's how cPanel will call each next hosted domain, which is not the default one: an add-on domain name). The files of the add-on domain names are quite simple to remove on the web server, because they all are created 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 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 domains, please. Decide for yourself how excellent cPanel's domain folder system is:
public_html (here my-default-domain.com is situated)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 name)
Are you growing baffled? We positively are!
Drawback Number 2: The same electronic mail folder system
The e-mail folder structure on the server is literally the same as that of the domain names... Repeating the same error twice?!? The sysadmin blokes firmly reinforce their faith in God when tackling the electronic mail folders on the mail server, praying not to botch things up too fatally.
Weak Point No.3: An utter deficiency of domain name management GUIs
Do we have to mention the sheer lack of a modern domain name manipulation menu - a place where you can: register/transfer/renew/park or administer domain names, change domain names' Whois information, protect the Whois info, edit/set up name servers (DNS) and DNS resource records? cPanel does not incorporate such a "modern" GUI at all. That's a huge weakness. An inexcusable one, we would like to add...
Negative Side Number 4: Multiple login places (minimum 2, maximum three)
What about the necessity for an extra login to make use of the invoicing, domain and technical support administration software solution? That's beside the cPanel user account login credentials you've been already supplied by the cPanel Web Hosting provider. Now and then, based on the invoicing tool (especially made for cPanel only) the cPanel Web Hosting distributor is availing of, the eager customers can wind up with 2 extra logins (1: the invoicing transaction/domain name management menu; 2: the trouble ticket support tool), ending up with an aggregate of 3 user login places (including cPanel).
Shortcoming Number Five: 120+ Control Panel sections to get familiar with... briskly
cPanel presents for your consideration more than a hundred and twenty menus inside the web hosting CP. It's a great idea to learn each one of them. And you'd better pick them up swiftly... That's extremely impudent on cPanel's side.
With all due veneration, we have a rhetorical question for all cPanel Web Hosting firms:
As far as we are informed, it's not the year 2001, is it? Mark that one too...
| Corporate | Starter | Business | Plus |
| Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage |
| Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth |
| Unlimited websites hosted | 1 website hosted | 5 websites hosted | 3 websites hosted |
| 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial |
| $9.06 / month | $3.70 / month | $5.73 / month | $4.72 / month |