cPanel Price Increased Rise: How Will this Massive Impact You?
cPanel Price Increased
has shaken the web hosting community with its recent price rise announcement. They have changed its pricing model from a per server pricing to a per account model.
So if you’re a cPanel partner and were paying $11 per cPanel license for each server and running 1,000 websites, you’ll now have to pay $122. That’s approximately 1000% price rise!
According to cPanel’s new pricing, here’s the breakup for 1000 websites :
- $32 for 100 accounts
- $0.1 each for 900 accounts
The “Not So Acceptable” New Pricing
The pricing is different depending upon the number of accounts. The price for the end user is comparatively higher than the cPanel partners.
General Pricing
- For 5 accounts – $20/month
- For 30 accounts – $30/month
- For 100 accounts – $45/month + $0.20 for each additional account
cPanel Partner Pricing
- For 5 accounts – $12.50/month
- For 30 accounts – $17.50/month
- For 100 accounts – $32/month + $0.10 for each additional account
cPanel Pricing: New vs Old
People are criticizing cPanel for rolling out the new pricing model. Let’s see the old and new pricing of cPanel:
- cPanel Pricing Earlier
Before it was simply VPS and dedicated pricing.
- Latest cPanel Pricing
The new pricing will not make a huge difference to people under 5 Accounts. However, as the accounts increase, cPanel will cost more than the server itself.
Major Impact on Web Hosting Community
Over the years, people have relied on cPanel for managing their sites.
cPanel’s popularity is because of its integration with Softaculous, LiteSpeed, PHP Selector, JetBackup, CageFS, CloudLinux, Imunify360, and much more. This has helped cPanel become faster, reliable, secure, and feature-rich.
This price increase seems to be a nonstrategic roll out and cPanel has faced major backlash from the web-hosting community!
Users on Twitter reacted with a lot of aggression and mostly negatively with most of them threatening to switch to alternative control panels.
1. End-Users
While servers with a single account can go for cPanel solo, and servers with under 5 accounts still get the same price, the overall price for end-user is comparatively higher for servers having more than 5 accounts.
2. Shared Hosting Providers or Resellers
The worst affected of the whole lot. Mostly, a shared hosting company will run around 1000 websites on a single VM with the $11/mo cPanel VM license. After the new changes come into effect, their cPanel license costs will rise to $122/mo! That’s a whopping 1000% increase and almost equivalent to their infrastructure or server costs ?
3. Unmanaged Server Providers
Generally, unmanaged server providers don’t have the access to the server and therefore, didn’t know how many accounts are on running on a server which was fine because the license was per server.
The new pricing model has added an extra layer of efforts for the providers. Now, they need to have a log of how many accounts are being created on a single server, or else they may end up footing the bill of thousands of dollars!
Who is Going to Get The Hardest Hit?
- Shared/Reseller Hosting Providers
- License holders in price-sensitive countries like Latin America, India, and other South East Asian countries.
Should You Remain With cPanel?
Pros
- cPanel has innovated over years with a user-friendly UI and a number of integrations
- Less time to spend on customer support
- No need to migrate data and involve in the risk of data loss
- You will avoid downtime caused while migrating data.
Cons
- With no annual billing, you will face the hassle of monthly invoices, lack of funds, etc.
- Substantially increased costs may either make business unviable for a few or the end clients will end up paying extra for these additional costs.
Coping Up with the cPanel Price Rise
If you’re choosing to stay with cPanel, the only solution is to re-evaluate your pricing structure. Only people with 100+ accounts will be hard it. You can transfer the extra 10/20 cents charges to customers.
However, be sure to properly communicate the price changes to customers.
cPanel Alternatives
With this unexpected change, people have already started finding alternatives. Some of them are:
- DirectAdmin
- InterWorx
- Virtualmin/Webmin
- VestaCP
What’s Next?
cPanel, WHMCS, SolusVM, and Plesk are under the same umbrella – The Oakley Investment. Here’s the timeline:
- Oakley acquired Plesk in May 2017 and there was an insane increase in prices between July 2017 to October 2017
- WHMCS prices hiked in Aug 2017
- Oakley Acquired cPanel in August 2018 and the price hiked in June 2019
SolusVM, are you next? We hope not.