Devastating Price Hike

From all across the world, web hosting companies, and resellers like myself, are devastated by this new cPanel licensing structure.
It is so bad, that forums are clogged with posts on this topic.

August 2019  --  Much of this article is taken from the HostingReview blog at:  https://hosting.review/news/cpanel-price-increase/

In A Nutshell

No-one has an issue with price increases....  this happens, but there are cases where some increases just seem unjustified.

• cPanel ( a 3rd-party software provider), license their product to web hosting companies, who pay an annual fee for each server on which they have the software installed

• In June 2019, cPanel announced that they were changing their license fee structure, from a per server base, to a per account base

• Most good web hosting companies have thousands of accounts on their servers

• As a result of the license fee structure change, the hosting companies fees to cPanel have rocketed.... up to 800% for very large user account base

• All hosting companies are now forced to pass on these fees to their own clients (like me)

• These clients (like me), now face an increase of anything between 100% and 800% (in my case, it is about 350%), for their hosting service

  • generally this would have to be passed on to clients, but in my case,
  • I will NOT be increasing my service fees to clients at this stage, but 350% increase puts me in an unsustainable loss-making position
  • I will be working feverishly to come up with some alternative to incresing fees to my clients

From all across the world, web hosting companies, and resellers like myself, are devastated by this new cPanel licensing structure.
It is so bad, that forums are clogged with posts on this topic.

Cpanel themselves have a community forum, and they have recently disabled registration to it, because of the amount of posts...  This is becomming a nightmare.

It will definitely put many small businesses out of action all across the world if nothing changes.

What Can Be Done?

At this early stage, I don't know. Some of the options include:

• Increase fees to clients (obviously not good, and not welcomed by me)
• Move all accounts to a different hosting company (not good, since all companies using cPanel will have the same issue)
• Use a hosting comapny with a different control panel, and move all client accounts over (not really good for obvious reasons)
• Have clients purchase their hosting directly from a hosting company, and I then manage it on their behalf (could get complicated, but may work, though this might cost my clients as much if not more than me simply increasing my rates)
• Shut down my hosting reseller business functions (this is the last thing I would want to do)

There isn't much more I can say at this stage. I will do what I can, and keep everyone informed if something comes up.

• I understand a companys need to raise fees at times
• I understand a companys desire to increase revenue generally
• I understand the concept of 'User Pays'
• but I don't understand this one...   I think cPanel (one of the worlds best providers of this type of software), is shooting themselves in the foot here
  • but thats just me!

I won't make this article any longer than it already is... there is so much more I could say, but I think you have a general idea of the situation.

Feel free to drop me a note or give me a call if there are any concerns on this, or any other matter.

A Good Article From Hosting Review

On June 27th, cPanel introduced new, account-based pricing, which is bound to increase costs for both hosting providers and users.

This decision was made a few months after cPanel was acquired by Oakley Capital, the investment group already owning Plesk - one of cPanel's biggest competitors.

cPanel promised that this partnership will have “no immediate customer impact” at that time, but it is now clear that the customers have been affected - and affected hard.

Since cPanel is one of the most popular hosting management panels used by hosting service companies, the increased prices will significantly affect many. Let's see what changed.

New cPanel Prices Explained

Previously, cPanel used to charge per server, meaning that companies were free to host as many accounts as they liked, as long as the server had a cPanel license.

Such a service used to cost $45 a month - or $425 a year per server. However, cPanel has now switched to account-based pricing, meaning that now the hosting service companies get charged based on the number of the accounts they host.

The new cost now, is:  $45 per month for the first 100 accounts, then an additional $0.20 per month for every account in excess of the first 100.

$0.20 per month - thats not a lot you say.........  but consider that most good hosting service companies have thousands of accounts hosted on their servers!

Here's how the new monthly pricing looks like:

While the prices seem reasonable, the situation gets worse if we consider larger numbers of accounts. Going upwards from 100 users, every additional user costs 20c/month, so the numbers look like this:

Or to better visualize: