The hosting community is buzzing with the latest news that cPanel has rolled-out a massive increase in pricing. But what does this mean for your hosting accounts moving forward and how will it affect your business? Many were shocked to learn about this pricing change issued by cPanel after enjoying low pricing for over 2 decades. The change comes in light of evolving technology in Internet and Tech and so with better quality server hardware comes more expense. While the pricing will be absorbed mostly by the Partners, Distributors, and cPanel Store customers a trickle-down effect will be felt by hosting account holders. cPanel has decided to group and standardize pricing and licenses for account holders, where they will be billed monthly. This means your hosting provider's costs are increasing and thus there will be a slight increase to VPS and Dedicated hosting accounts. It's unclear now if Shared hosting will also be affected.
What does the new Pricing look like?
To explain what the new pricing looks live for hosting providers and even White-Label or Reseller Hosting customers we will use some hypothetical numbers to explain. A hosting provider that is a cPanel partner, which roughly means they maintain their own servers whereas you rent server space from your host; the new pricing would look like this: As a cPanel partner in the past, it was $11 per cPanel license for each server running roughly 1,000 websites. What a deal right? Well with the new pricing it will now cost $122 per server, and if you’re good at math you're right that translates to a 1000% rise in price. Just sample numbers to illustrate the markup that cPanel has suddenly rolled out to its customers. Note: Additionally, there has been a labelling added for VPS accounts (Cloud) and Dedicated accounts (metal) Thus, with 1000 websites cPanel's new pricing breakdown (the real numbers) will look something like this:
- cPanel Premier first 100 accounts $32
- 900 additional accounts for $0.10 each Note: This pricing includes cloud and metal accounts, that is VPS and dedicated servers.
More About General Pricing
With the new pricing, cPanel has moved away from yearly license to Account based payments per month. They have also added a 3-tier system:
- cPanel Admin which includes up to 5 accounts $20/per month (not available for metal)
- cPanel Pro which includes up to 30 accounts $30/per month (not available for metal)
- cPanel Premier which includes up to 100 accounts with anything over 100 considered a bulk account with a price per account attached. $45/per month
- cPanel Premier Bulk $0.20 per additional account. Each Premier account automatically switches to a bulk account once the number reaches 101.
cPanel Partner Pricing
- Admin for 5 accounts $12.50/month
- Pro for 30 accounts: $17.50/month.
- Premier For 100 accounts: $32/month.
- Premier Bulk after 100 accounts $0.10 for each additional account
Negative Backlash from the Web Hosting Community
To say the web hosting community is in an uproar about the spike in prices over at cPanel is an understatement. Rightly so, as the company has stated, it has been over 20 years that prices have been reasonably low for an excellent product that helps hosting providers and website owners manage websites and reseller accounts. cPanel was not only popular because of its price point but it also integrates many hosting favourites such as PHP Selector, Softaculous, JetBackUp, CageFS, CloudLinux, LiteSpeed, and much more applications. Coupled with amazing apps that made managing your website smoother and an easy to use interface, cPanel emerged as the feature-rich, fast, reliable and secure choice for companies and users alike. The hosting community ist taking these price changes laying down. Many took to social media with their outcry and threats to switch to other control panel solutions. While this has stirred some anger the price hike has been explained by cPanel to reflect the rapid changes being made within the Internet Technology Industry itself. As servers become faster with new emerging innovative technology they simply want to catch up and match the evolution. Can't fault them for wanting to match the price with the quality of hardware that is now in the market. While this will directly affect the costs of hosting packages overall, we are confident that things will remain affordable for everyone involved once the adjustment period smooths out.
How will everyone be affected?
End-Users
Generally speaking, the price point for the end-user will be significantly higher if the server has more than 5 accounts, while servers with a single account attached can opt for cPanel solo they will still be required to pay the same price. Furthermore, end-users that simply bought shared or reseller hosting from their hosting provider without purchasing a cPanel license (most shared accounts include a free cPanel at present) you may end up paying a higher price for your overall hosting package. As an alternative to cPanel, you can opt for a control panel like Plesk or InterWorx.
Shared and Reseller Hosting Providers
Possibly the most affected group by this new pricing roll-out. A shared hosting company typically has over 1000 websites running on a single server with an $11/per month cPanel license as aforementioned. However, once the new changes take effect their cPanel license will cost $122/per month again, this translates to a crazy 1000% increase. Which is comparable to infrastructure and server costs. Therefore, it is clear that a lot of hosting providers will have to increase the costs of their Shared and Reseller packages that include cPanel free. Which circles back to the end-user having their wallets directly affected by this change. Shared hosting has always been such a reliable and affordable hosting option for new and smaller businesses, that this could impact the hosting industry very negatively. Forgive them, internet gods, for they know not what they do.
The Real Question: Should You Remain with cPanel?
Our short answer is yes. cPanel gained popularity because of the robust features, the power and usability it packs. Which is why everyone is so blindsided by this news because they enjoyed all of the feature-rich goodness of cPanel for so long at such affordable prices. cPanel truly made managing and running a website as easy as pie. With that being said, there are, however, some obvious Pros and Cons of staying with cPanel after this new pricing revelation. Let's weigh in.
Pros
- Tried and tested innovation backed by over 20 years in the business that has led to high UX, and a completely user-friendly interface with a myriad of software integrations that makes website management easy for the least technically savvy.
- With cPanel your time spent contacting Technical or customer support is almost non-existent.
- Little to no technical savvy? No problem! cPanel ensures that data migration isn't necessary so no risk in screwing things up and losing some highly sensitive data, or worst your entire website.
- No website downtime to worry about if data migration is necessary.
Cons
- Monthly billing can be a hassle. The loss of the annual billing convenience will be an adjustment curve.
- Increased costs can make running an online business harder for small business users or additional costs may impact overall profit margins. When the pros outweigh the cons, we'd wager its best to stick with what you know. While the new pricing is a bit jarring, moving some expenses around where your business is concerned can help mitigate any financial pressure that may arise.
