cPanel have announced massive price increases that have seen hosting providers and users alike riling. Instead of paying per server, licensees will now have to pay per user account. This change is effective immediately and no options for grandfathering existing licenses have been provided.
cPanel, a very popular web hosting control panel was acquired by venture capitalist Oakley Capital in 2018.
Oakley Capital has been on a recent buying spree while jacking up the pricing of their product portfolio, which now also includes Plesk and WHMCS.
For cPanel Partners the price increase is somewhat less steep. However, there has been chatter on sites such as Web hosting talk with examples of more than 1000% monthly increases.
The official announcement can be found here. The cPanel forum and blog are currently down. We’ll leave the reason up to your imagination.
What does this mean for Woktron clients?
We will be considering the discontinuation of sales of cPanel licenses that come bundled with our Virtual Private Servers and dedicated servers. Our shared hosting plans are not affected in any way. As a DirectAdmin partner we have and will continue to support the development team of DirectAdmin.
Promotion
A time limited promotion is available for those wishing to move from a cPanel account, VPS or dedicated server to DirectAdmin:
- Web Hosting, Enterprise Hosting, Reseller Hosting – 25% lifetime discount for cPanel refugees.
- KVM VPS, Hybrid VPS, Cloud Reseller VPS – Free DirectAdmin license
- Low-Cost Dedicated Servers – Free DirectAdmin license
- Premium Dedicated Servers – Free DirectAdmin license
cPanel to DirectAdmin Conversion Script
We provide free migrations for cPanel refugees.
A conversion script from cPanel to DirectAdmin is also available:
http://www.custombuild.eu/cpanel/cpanel_to_da.sh
Known issues:
- cPanel mdbox format email transfer has not been tested
- Mailman mailing lists do not get converted to majordomo mailing lists
What about Plesk
Plesk cannot be recommended for the simple reason that it is owned by Oakley Capital as well. If you are leaving cPanel due to the business practices of Oakley Capital, do not expect anything to be any better with Plesk.
Store Licensing Guide
cPanel have released a Store Licensing Guide that offers additional information.
The “why Change” page found in the Store Licensing Guide attempts to justify these changes, in hilarious fashion I should add:
Why Change?
Our goal is to be as transparent as possible with our prices. We want to simplify the process of adding new servers and make it easier to become a cPanel customer. Additionally, it is important for us to provide licenses that target smaller instances, opening up a new revenue opportunity for our customers.Historically, cPanel has based its services and pricing around a VPS or Dedicated license with unlimited cPanel Accounts. When cPanel defined its original pricing structure, some twenty plus years ago, servers were not as powerful as they are today. Thanks to constant innovation in the hardware sector and optimization in our software, we can now run hundreds of websites on a single processor system. With this change, we align ourselves with this growing technology. As the company has evolved, cPanel has added more development resources, more structure, and more brain power that, in turn, makes it possible to take on an increasing number of development projects. Adjusting our prices will ensure that we can continue to invest in product development, thrive in an increasingly hostile security landscape, grow our customer ecosystem, and remain a leader in hosting automation.
Benefits
The benefits begin immediately. We are focusing on easing the common upgrade path from shared-customer to private cloud-customer. This new structure opens up the possibility of deploying lower density customer instances without the need to purchase a large multi-Account license. It defines the price of each license based on the number of Accounts hosted on the server. By continuing to focus on the user experience, and taking into consideration cPanel’s Account density per instance, cPanel customers will be able to provision their hosting infrastructure more efficiently. Customers with a lower cPanel Account density will also see benefits in performance, resource utilization, and in some cases, a reduction in their invoicing.
What is new?
Moving forward, we are transitioning all customers to monthly billing. As yearly licenses come up for renewal, we will do a one-time conversion from your current package to either Admin, Pro, or Premier based on what is most appropriate for your server unless you opt to have the license expire in the Manage Licenses interface of the cPanel Store.As of today, cPanel Solo licenses will only be available for purchase through cPanel Partners, and will no longer be available for purchase through the cPanel Store. On September 1st, any existing cPanel Solo licenses will be converted automatically to Admin Cloud or Premier Metal based on what is most appropriate for your server.
Alternatives to cPanel
please visit our control panel comparison for alternatives to cPanel.
