Cpanel License price revision and its impact

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 willl now have to pay $122. That’s approximately 1000% price rise!

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!

If you use Twitter, then search for cpanel and you will see the massive Twitter backlash cPanel is currently undergoing regarding these changes. If you want to join in on the discussion, you can also join the web hosting talk & Reddit discussions at the links below:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1770316

https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/c67n84/new_cpanel_pricing_structure/

cPanel was acquired by a group led by Oakley Capital, last year, since then we knew the price change was about to come but the change they have announced could increase the license cost to 20x for some of the companies.

To understand how this price change will affect you, let’s see this example below:

cPanel Pricing Earlier Vs cPanel Pricing Now

cPanel Pricing Earlier

So far CPANEL has a simple license model,

$15 per month for VPS/CLOUD Licenses – Unlimited Users & Domains
$35 for Dedicated servers – Unlimited Users & Domains

With this price change, they have completely removed the concept of unlimited users and have introduced a new layer which works on per user basis. This would force all hosting companies to re-evaluate their entire business model and customers must address this complete change in just two months, as new pricing will be effective September 15, 2019.

Here’s what used to be the old price of CPanel

How to Cope Up with the cPanel Price Rise

If you have 300 cPanel users on your VPS, Your new price would be:
₹ 3250 per month for 100 cPanel users + ₹ 500 per month for every 50 cPanel user per month. With 300 cPanel users, your new billing would now convert to
₹ 3250 + ₹ 2000 = ₹ 5250 Per month (That’s almost 5x of your monthly fee)

With new prices of cPanel on your VPS

If you had 300 cPanel users on your VPS, the price of license was flat ₹ 999 Per Month and no restriction on users.

With old prices of Cpanel:

• 5 accounts or less: ₹ 1250 plus tax/month
• 6-30 accounts: ₹ 1750 plus tax/month
• 31-50 accounts: ₹ 2500 plus tax/month
• 50-100 accounts: ₹ 3250 plus tax/month

So what cPanel has done is they have introduced slabs and distinguished them on the basis of the number of accounts (cPanel) hosted on the Cloud/metal.

Suppose you have 100 Websites (with cPanel each) hosted on your VPS a.k.a Cloud. Earlier as we saw, you were billed just 20$/month, but now you will be billed $45/month.

cPanel in its account-based pricing has added tiers to its new pricing model. Please note that here Cloud means VPS & Metal means Dedicated server. Let’s understand this with different situations and understand how you will be priced differently now.

Latest cPanel Pricing

Here if you carefully see the pricing, there is no restriction on the number of cPanel accounts that can be added on a VPS or Dedicated Server.

Here are some measures that can help you save money by reducing cost on cPanel Licensing:

Migrate to a cPanel Alternative

This option might seem challenging, but it is the only way to go forward if you want to reduce your prices and have the option of unlimited accounts. There are four predominant control panels, cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, and Interworx. All of these options have been on the market for a long time and do largely the same things, but there are positives and negatives to each in this scenario. Our Sales team would connect with you to offer the option to migrate to Direct Admin which would work on the same cost.

Q. I am a Shared Hosting Client?

You will be affected by this if you have more than 5 cPanel accounts so we will reach out to you in the next 14 days.  Any price increase will match exactly the difference in license cost between what we pay today vs what we will pay at change time.  If you want to explore a cPanel alternative talk to our team and we can explore a migration for you.

Q. I have a Managed Server with many accounts?

In that case, nothing would really change for you, you can continue using CPanel for a single user without any price change

Q. I have a Single Account Managed Server?

We are working on various options and we’ll let you know what options are available in the next 14 days.

Q. I want to move my server to a cPanel Alternative?

If you are a managed server-client, we will work with you to ensure you can continue to use your preferred hosting control panel, but your price for your license will increase based on the number of accounts you have on the server.  We’ll be writing to all clients in the next 7 days to let them know personally, how much this is for them.

Q. I want to keep my server with cPanel?

Since earlier there were no restrictions on the number of cPanel accounts we could have on a server, we might be having some cPanel accounts that are no longer in use today and just sitting idle. It’s time to delete those accounts and save on your licensing cost.

Deleting unused accounts

In the short-term, nothing should change for you besides a price increase in-line with the number of accounts you have with us. The price change would be close to ₹ 250 Per year is what we assume.

Q. I am a Reseller Hosting / Multisite Hosting Client?

We’ll be giving you options to either migrate to a different control panel choice between DirectAdmin/Interworx or you can continue hosting on CPanel by paying ₹ 250 Per User account per year hosted on your reseller account.

For any further information please get in touch with our team on +91-22-25207732 /34 we are always here to help you.