cPanel price rise has shaken the web hosting community with cPanel’s recent announcement. They have changed their pricing model from 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 a 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
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
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.
Contact us for fully managed premium hosting services.
Sakshi takes care of everything related to Marketing at Webscoot.io. She has knowledge about Magento, WordPress, and Dogs.
This is going to be a disaster for resellers as well as shared hosting companies.
Most of the people and companies will start moving away to different panels in a year or so.
Hi Ankit. Absolutely! Oakley could have increased cPanel prices like they did for Plesk but this new model seems insane for shared hosting companies with over 500 accounts running on a single server.
Total disaster. Will shift all cPanel servers to DirectAdmin or InterWorx only.
Hey Chris. Totally understand your frustration here with this outrageous price hike by cPanel. Interworx and DirectAdmin are the 2 main alternatives that most of the hosts would switch to. followed by VestaCP, Virtualmin and others.
i hope cpanel goes bankrupt after this price increase. we will all move to another control panel.
Hi Danny,
I get your situation. cPanel’s new pricing is insane. Seems like a golden opportunity for cPanel’s competitors.
All hosting provider should stop selling new licenses of cpanel and plan to migrate their existing services. The new cpanel license cost will no longer help to run hosting business if we choose this product. disaster……..
Majority of hosting companies might continue using cPanel and pass on the extra costs to the end customers. End customers are comfortable with cPanel and will agree to spend a few bucks extra. A few of the price sensitive companies, may switch to alternative control panels.
*uck those greedy *ss MoFo’s
Cloud based control panels being considered here. About time this happened IMHO as CP’s installed on each server have had their days!! Considered run cloud, server pilot, but went with clustercs being HA ready and support is top notch.
I think it’s about time, this will stop all these one man band resellers selling hosting for $1.00 and saturating the market with budget low-cost hosting.
We can now make this a level playing field.
Thank goodness I am so over trying to compete with budget hosting companies.
Hooooray!!!!!
Thats another way to look at it 😉
I am not understanding we are using our workstation for our client to provide an excellent service. Software cost Cpanel is more than the Hardware cost and how can they restricted no of the client as to put our server. More over Cpanel is not providing any software developing tool, But now the Hardware cost very very less to compare the new cpanel price. (Software) The Cpanel allows over the year to fill the system with the user and now restricted the user in the term of counts 100 after 1X.20. The Big issue I have for migrating because many clients we have to move the package and another service safely. Why Cpanel has to Forget to Calculate Email count / Database Count / Subdomain Count / HttpAPI request count/ so they can start another new Cpanel firm.
I use DirectAdmin and Cpanel on 2 different servers.
I am now switching to Directadmin because I now have to pay 100% more.
There is also no difference in functionality at all.
The fact that a supplier is going to raise his prices so drastically is, I think, an unreliable policy.
With DirectAdmin I only pay 270 euros for a “Liftime License”.
I never knew that, I will switch to DirectAdmin.
Thank you Cpanel for the price increase because by switching to DirectAdmin I now save money.
This was beautiful. Thank you.
Hello, I am a blogger writing about educational stuff. Today my hosting provider raised the prices for Linux hosting, now what can i do? Is there any other Good Options available?
Hello,
A lot of hosting providers are also giving the option to switch from cPanel to a cheaper control panel like DirectAdmin without increase in costs. You can ask your hosting provider or search hosting providers offering DirectAdmin.
The company, founded in 1997 and snapped up by Oakley Capital last year.
Oakley – the greedy capitalist pigs.
Obv just in it for the money as all these capitalist vultures are.
I just switched from a HostGator VPS to NameCheap VPS recently and I only host my own websites. Namecheap just notified me that only 5 websites are included in my plan, so this double my costs which sucks. Awesome to see you use Divi by the way! I recognize that secondary header bar anywhere. I wasn’t a huge fan of the old builder but the new one is not to bad to deal with media queries and its MUCH faster. Cuts a lot of time out with child themes. Ive been a member of ET for 11 years so they have come a long way.
We are a very small hosting company after that price, we decide to change from cPanel (F) to Plesk (or might find other Hosting Panel like DirectAdmin.
I would say F you cPanel.
VestaCP is not a very good alternative, the panel is outdated and is hacked 2 times in a short time. Plesk is ok in combination with acronis cyber cloud on a dedicated server and I guess also for VPS. Directadmin is also a good choice
You made a number of good points there. I did a search on the subject matter and found most people will go along with with your blog.
Due to the Cpanel pricing increase, it’s difficult for me to purchase Cpanel for my clients. We have more than 300 accounts, any alternatives for Cpanel?