Announcing Account Based Pricing

[MattGarner]

This is a sad day indeed for cPanel and the web hosting industry. The price increases and per account limits are absolutely insane. I wouldn't have minded price increases in general if they were reasonable and you did not set any silly account limits on the plans.

I really do hope the people behind the prices changes have a good hard think and look at the feedback they are getting across the internet and revert the changes or have a Plan B. If not, I feel a lot of people will be moving to alternative control panels and I may also have to do this.

 

[Tayyem]

cPanel, You are using a lot of Open-Source tools in your interface and we will not accept the new price we will have to look to other options.

 

[smashbox]

There's no way in hell you're going to make it past this. Talk to your silly VC's and explain to them that the community is hard at work at boycotting your product. The only thing this hike did was piss off the internet, get you ddosed (rightfully so), and brought together large players to start developing an open source panel to avoid your atrocious behavior. Come back to us without the user limits, and see everyone "happy". Keep this up, and fade away like some old panel nobody will remember. You will soon find yourself receiving class action suits in the US, and the European Union sanctioning you for unfair practices / monopoly. Get schooled here Antitrust: Overview – Competition - European Commission

 

[hoststage]

I sincerely hope internally you are doing something to revert it. But that's what I'm relying on as a Business owner for now. Hope.


I see people saying that they would be okay in a lesser increase with tiered plans or X% increase. I'm 100% against it no matter what.
You don't get to do this, you just don't. There is no runaway with our money pockets full or slightly lesser.


Here is another reason why:

You have a control panel for web hosting companies which relied on your pricing to make theirs. Not only you changed this out of the blue and into disproportional amounts, but your cousin company (WHMCS) isn't even providing the tool to adapt our own invoicing system on our end if we were to keep going with cPanel.

You released an API for us to scramble a sort of fair invoicing system for which clients will have a different renewal date and may cancel at anytime after we paid you.

We lost complete vision over our cPanel cost and even though facts would be that it won't be evolving much, this remains unacceptable to have such risks inside a company. A bad guy making a script on his VPS to create X millions accounts and running away his X dollars before payment, or even a chargeback or whatever and us being charged. This mere risk is just unacceptable as it could lead to bankruptcy with a 2 hours effort from a dishonest person (which you should hire immediately it would be a great fit in cPanel).

So not only you steal money, (because this is a theft, let's call it by what it is) but you give us no concrete solutions on how to cope with it.

What you don't know by a lack of vision yet is that you are now doomed. cPanel has an expiration date and all yours jobs are at stakes. So you'll be out of jobs and morally crushed to have enforced the theft.

Now, while we haven't yet decided what to do besides bashing you so hard as you deserve. We will coercively have to keep some cPanel servers and swallow an increase and some risk that we are urged to address (that cost falls on us as well by the way because that's not an hour thing to do like your API update was).


There is no words to even remotely describe the what you have done, and the how you have done and the proportion you have done it, the delay you have given and what you are asking us to do to adapt to all this.

 

[smashbox]

This new pricing model destroys many small hosters and forces them to switch to Plesk.

Plesk Web Host Edition is already available for $ 15 and I can host unlimited accounts on it.

Our end customers do not accept these new prices. We have already received the first cancellations.

The prices of the competition sink more and more, which is why it is difficult to be competitive with a cPanel system. But with this price increase, we will probably have to separate from cPanel.

I hope this decision will be reconsidered.

Don't think changing over to Plesk will be any better. They're owned by the same investment group, who's out to get the last penny in your pocket. Consider Direct Admin, see the discussion on WHT - Massive cPanel price rises [merged] | Web Hosting Talk

Seems like lots of moderation on this thread. WHT already reached 45 pages, and everyone is LIVID about the absurd price changes. Change your prices @cPanel or feel the wrath of hosting providers. Your ROI will jump now, die out by Q1 2020, and hit red by Q3 2020. What once was a great panel, is now an abusive bully in the industry forcing providers and end-users into their monopoly gains. SHAME ON YOU, AND OAKLEY!

 

[Domenico]

Shame on you cPanel. A BIG shame on you.

I started out with cPanel 1.0 and here we are, everybody who made you big is being punished. With this announcement you lost me and I hope many more will leave you. A total dick move, that's what this is.

 

[Rimesia]

Because we, the ones who feed you, will abandon cPanel, and start using ugly, insecure, buggy control panels,

No worries, those "ugly" and "buggy" control panels will develop rapidly since lots of datacenters are looking for a way a migrate. cPanel is nothing without their customers and now those customers will support another panel.

The biggest datacenter companies in our webmaster board are already started testing the migrate to another control panel. They will encourage their customers once they are done and hopefully, we will be cPanel free. When you think about this way, it's great news for all of us since we will no longer have to pay a ridiculous amount of money every month. Small lifetime license will be enough.

 

[Lolfust]

TERRIBLE DECISION WITH THIS MASSIVE PRICE INCREASE! YOU DESTORYED THE WHOLE SHARED AND RESELLER HOSTING PROVIDERS WITH THIS GREED! IF THE PRICE INCREASE WERE REASONABLE AS FOR 50-80% FROM ORIGINAL IT HAD ALOT OF NOISE BUT STILL PEOPLE WILL USE CPANEL NOW? FORGET IT!

 

[Shazan]

We could swallow it but we won't, there are a lot of other control panels to choose from, even free ones.

So dear cPanel, we will immediately remove cPanel and Plesk EVEN AS AN OPTION from our offers and we will migrate all of our servers to DirectAdmin. Sorry but your product does not worth the new prices, DirectAdmin works better, has a new skin (better than PaperLantern) and is cheaper.
The only reason we used cPanel was the price, not the features or qualities.

Good bye

 

[monarobase]

This will sadly hit us very hard too. It feels like cPanel was managing fine financially with the previous pricing and that the extra 500+% increase does not sound like it will go towards improving the product.

Previous pricing was quite cheap for our usage and for very powerfull servers with 900 users we could afford a 3x licence increase but an 900 account licence with silver discount was $32 is now going up to $205 whereas we only consider it worth $100 per month.

Yes we could increase our prices by $2.30 per year per account but we don't like increasing existing customers so that's a $2000 loss per server for us. Like most webhosts we run with low margins so we can compete with larger hosts with the own built system. If we increase our prices we will loose old and new customers.

If the new pricing scheme is kept and no extra tiers are added (a 800 or 1000 tier could help prevent going over 3x increase ?), maybe you could add staff so that essential features like fixing cPanel's IMAP compatibility with Outlook come out faster to partially justify this huge amount of extra cash you will have.

 

[Ulysses]

100% price increase for cPanel license?

We just got informed that when our annual license expires, in about a year, that we will be subject to new monthly pricing.

In our case, we have a box with just 79 users on it and we pay US$180 a year. The new price of US$45 per month will cost us US$360 a year which is double what we are paying now!

Is cPanel being a bit greedy or did I miscalculate something?

How are you impacted by this price hike and what are you planning to overcome the problem?

Thanks

Michael

 

[jmginer]

In which head is it possible that the license of a server is more expensive than the server itself?

We are still waiting for a MySQL 8 integration, and something as simple as a cPanel user being able to create an additional cPanel access for his webmaster so he doesn't have to provide his password, which is a very serious security flaw.

With this disinterest in the development of the product you have the shame to raise the price.

It is completely unacceptable to charge an extra for each additional account. If there is no option of unlimited accounts at a reasonable price, we will simply stop using your product, a migration to another panel is better than closing the business.

 

[msullivan]

It is unfortunate that cPanel has opted to make such a drastic change in pricing model.

I own a small business but there’s no way I’ll be able to grow with these price increases. I guess it’s time to look for alternative control panel solutions.

Michael

 

[Khloros]

Thats how you'll create yourself a strong opponent.

 

[InterServed]

Almost zero value in the past year of updates and now the bomb. Nick the betrayal ftw. Bye bye cPanel after 10years+ of business.

 

[Ankur]

hopefully this makes cpanle profit go down 100% in long run if not die

 

[vacancy]

What is the purpose of oakley capital?

Forcing hosting companies to go bankrupt?
Destroy a 22 year old company?

 

[webicom]

We all can copmplain but the truth is they dont care. The math is simple and they know it. If all of us switch to another control panel till the end of the year the Oakley Capital will return their investment and they know the majority cant switch faster then that. We will se how it goes from now on but we have stoped offering WHM/Cpanel for new VPS servers and will probably use directadmin or free ISPconfig, regardles that panel was excelant provider till now. We know that we will surely loose almost all of our small VPS customers on VPS servers hosting from 50 to 100 accounts but they will not buy license elsewhere...they will tell the customer they are closing and customers will go to difrent web hosts. I think that this is begining of the end of WHM/Cpanel...Oakley Capital will return the investment and also they will for shore do make some profit since they will charging us so much more for the time. The second scenario is that Oakly owns some big web hosts and is plananig to slowly get majority of end customrs or third scenaro is that big web hosts will not pay same price as we and will have advantage coze they will not have to increase prices or change seling packages model. I do not know what is going on but this kind of price increase is definitely not consequence of what they say "servers are much stronger now..." coze if that was the trouth they would start the priceing model for 100 cpanel account at Admin package for $20 but no...they allow only 5 cpanel account for $20. In our case we will have to pay from 600% and more for licenses from now on. If they would be fair they would not change prices but would limit support request per one license and start charging support instead. Who knows mybe cpanel will start offering web hosting...investment found always want more and more.
This is second time in 16 years they are changeing model of selling licenses. Years back we ware buying liftime licenses but then they changed to 1 year VPS or dedicated and that was excelent model coze they started to sell big. My small company was able to offer cost effective VPS with WHM cpanel licenses and eaven we started to host smaller VPS each with new license and that way we ware buying more and more but from now on not just will we stop buying we will have to decrease number of licenses......not that we want but we will have to....sadly... they just dont care for us coze they will get investment back one way or the other. If they dont have other hidden plan .ike becoming hosting company or they do not own big hosting company...and they see a lot of decrease of selling licenses they can always sell Cpanel to someone else but in the meantime we small hosting companys must somehow survive.

 

[webicom]

100% price increase for cPanel license?

We just got informed that when our annual license expires, in about a year, that we will be subject to new monthly pricing.

In our case, we have a box with just 79 users on it and we pay US$180 a year. The new price of US$45 per month will cost us US$360 a year which is double what we are paying now!

Is cPanel being a bit greedy or did I miscalculate something?

How are you impacted by this price hike and what are you planning to overcome the problem?

Thanks

Michael

Your math is wrong ... $45 x 12 = $540 not $360 so you will pay 300% more

 

[Vini]

I recommend all hosting providers to build a open sources web hosting control panel better then cPanel and wipe them out of industry. Hire dedicated group of team for the development of the control panel. Lets start this project on Github and replace cPanel now. I guess the owner of cPanel is greedy for money. He wants to kill small based web hosting owners. But cPanel don't know the power of common man. Can we conduct a meeting for this ?