cPanel has attracted negative attention from the web hosting community after it was announced their pricing plans would change. It turns out cPanel is moving away from their standard pay per server for unlimited cPanel accounts. Instead, they will use a new payment structure based on a pay per account system. Now cPanel users will have to pay for individual account. As a result, hosting providers will experience a massive price increase for their cPanel license. Let’s break the recent cPanel price hike and see how cPanel customers will be effected.
Table of Contents
What Is cPanel?
For those that are unaware of what cPanel is let’s review the service. cPanel is a control panel designed for Web Hosting services to make management and everyday tasks a simple process. A cPanel user gains access to a wide range of features and functions clearly organised in the cPanel control panel. Users can easily to navigate categories to find important sections to manage their hosting account. From a users account there are sections to manage website File, Domains, Emails, Security, Database and Software Management. It is for this reason that cPanel is a market leader for web hosting control panels.
Why is cPanel Increasing their Prices?
As a market leader, cPanel has been operating for more than twenty years. During this period of time, cPanel did not change the prices for cPanel customers. So why are prices changing now? Well, according to cPanel’s blog, in the last twenty years, their hardware and networking infrastructure has seen a dramatic improvement. Especially in its performance and capacity to integrate other software and web apps. As a result, one server can host multiple websites rather than just one.
The old pricing model allowed cPanel customers to purchase one license for their server. While, at the same time, they could and create unlimited cPanel accounts when required for additional websites hosted on the same server at no extra cost. As a result, a cPanel user could have over 100 accounts with only one license key. With the new pricing model, a cPanel user would have to purchase those 100 accounts resulting in a dramatic price increase.
As quoted in a blog posted by cPanel:
“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 optimisation 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.” – cPanel
cPanel customers are very sceptical when it comes to this price change. cPanel will be able to generate more income from the service they provide.
How are Prices Changing?
With the old pricing model, our cost for a cPanel VPS license was between £10 and £15 per month. The cost of a dedicated cPanel license was between £32 and £36 per month both with access to unlimited cPanel accounts.
Now the cheapest license offered to cPanel customers is their VPS license for up to 5 accounts priced at $20 per month. If a cPanel user requires between 5 and 30 cPanel accounts for a VPS it will cost $30 per month.
Prior to cPanel announcement, we offered a cPanel license with a dedicated server plan for just, 26.00/month. Now cPanel’s dedicated cPanel license that covers 100 accounts now costs around $45 a month. What’s more, if you require additional cPanel accounts these come at an additional cost of $0.20 extra a month.
How Does the cPanel Price Increase Impact Customers?
A cPanel user with one cPanel account will not be significantly impacted by this price update as the price for one account will remain the same $15. cPanel customers that have over 5 cPanel accounts need to be aware of these price updates to budget effectively. In short, the price change only impacts cPanel users that currently have over 5 cPanel accounts or are looking to purchase more.
How will the cPanel Price Increase Impact Web Hosting Companies?
The impact of cPanel’s price change on web hosting companies will be massive and could impact the price of services such as Shared Hosting.
A shared hosting account is a cost-effective web hosting option as clients share the same server with multiple users. For a web hosting company, it used to be easy to provide shared hosting accounts with cPanel. The cost of the cPanel was split between users on the same server. With the new account based pricing model web hosting companies are required to pay per cPanel account they create for a shared hosting user. As a result, offering cPanel as a control panel to shared hosting users becomes more expensive to maintain.
Now cPanel has changed their pricing model. This forces hosting companies to purchase cPanels on a per account based pricing. As opposed to a per server rate. Web hosting companies will be unable to offer this amazing discount to their clients. Instead of paying $11/month for 100 accounts a web hosting company will have to pay $32/month for 100 accounts. This is a 109.01% increase in price!
What Happens To My Existing Multi-year licenses?
A cPanel user that has a multi-year license maybe confused as to how these price changes impact their current subscription. As the expiry date for the subscription purchased approaches cPanel will convert annual billing customers to a monthly cycles. Yearly billing options are no longer available as of June 27th, 2019.
Depending on the cPanel users’ requirements either the Admin, Pro or Premier package can be selected. cPanel customers have the option to let their subscriptions expire if changing to a new control panel.
Why should I Stay With cPanel?
A question on cPanel users minds is, “Should I Stay With cPanel?” The answer to this question needs to be decided by cPanel customers on an individual basis. It is important to take into consideration the following.
Years of Experience
cPanel has been operating for over 20 years. With 20 Years of Experience cPanel has come a long way. In fact, their users have access to a highly sophisticated control panel fine-tuned over time.
Easy To Navigate Layout
cPanel’s layout is very easy to navigate allowing cPanel users to complete tasks with ease. As one of the most popular control panels, cPanel users are pretty familiar with this platform. Getting familiar with a new control panel takes time and may impact efficiency negatively.
Migrating Dangers
When switching control panels, you must migrate all files and data correctly. If done incorrectly data loss can occur.
Yearly Billing No Longer Available
Annual billing was a useful feature that allowed cPanel customers to prepay for cPanel for an entire year. Unfortunately, this ended on June 27th, 2019. As of now, all cPanel user must use monthly billing cycle. These cycles fall under the admin, pro, or premiere packages. It is important to ensure that you can make monthly payments as missing a payment can result in a suspension of service.
The take away
If you have a website and use the cPanel Control Panel to manage your hosting account, then this article concerns to you. This is not just a per hosting company issue, as cPanel’s price increase is for all websites with cPanel. We hope that we could provide you with some clarity on the current developments of cPanel.
At hosting.co.uk we provide some of the most affordable hosting plans in the world. We simply can’t ignore the drastic change in cPanel pricing. This is why we are informing our community of current the developments. We foresee a slight increase in the future, but we are working assiduously to keep our prices competitively priced for the current hosting market.
