cPanel 800% Price Rise : How Will this Impact You?

cPanel 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 :

1. $32 for 100 accounts
2. $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

You can find more information about the latest pricing here.

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

 

What Does this Mean ? The Impact will be This :

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.

If you are just an end-user who bought shared or reseller hosting from another hosting company, and you do not directly purchase cPanel licenses, then either you will end up paying a higher fee for your hosting or else be forced to use an alternative control panel like InterWorx, DirectAdmin, or Plesk.

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?

1. Shared/Reseller Hosting Providers
2. License holders in price-sensitive countries like Latin America, India, and other South East Asian countries.

Should You Remain With cPanel?
Pros

1. cPanel has innovated over years with a user-friendly UI and a number of integrations
2. Less time to spend on customer support
3. No need to migrate data and involve in the risk of data loss
4. You will avoid downtime caused while migrating data.

Cons

1. With no annual billing, you will face the hassle of monthly invoices, lack of funds, etc.
2. 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:

1. DirectAdmin
2. InterWorx
3. Virtualmin/Webmin
4. VestaCP

Update: cPanel Revised Pricing After Backlash
A week after the backlash from existing customers and partners, cPanel apologized and amended their new pricing.

For partners

1. Implementation support will be provided. cPanel will apply a one-time credit to cover invoice up to $10,000 USD.
2. The pricing will be effective only when WHMCS will support the new pricing model.
3. cPanel introduced a new fixed pricing cost model.

 

Cpanel price increase has shocked numerous webmasters and hosting providers. The pricing is different based upon the number of accounts. And the price for the end-user is comparatively more expensive than the cPanel partners.

So now what I feel is to look for an alternative for Cpanel. There are numerous alternatives for Cpanel and OVI Panel is one among them.

 

This is really blunt. We have been heavily affected.
From.$85 our bills rise to $450.

Thats unacceptable.

We have just migrated our first server to DA.