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tl;dr version

Starting this month, any new shared or business shared accounts will cost $1/month more than previously.  Existing clients will have their rates honored until January 1st, 2020, at which point on the next renewal date, they will be increased to the new rate. Cloud customers will get moved to the 5 Account License at no additional charge, but will need to pay for additional accounts after the initial 5.  We will be contacting Cloud Customers directly to discuss their options.

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For many, many year cPanel has been the go to option for the hosting industry, partly because of the features it provides including ease of use for customers, and partly because of its fixed cost.

In an email posted last month, cPanel now is adjusting its rates, starting this month to a per account on the server cost.  This has significant ramifications for both us as a provider and our clients.

A little background...

Last year, cPanel was purchased by a company Oakley Capital, who also own the Plesk Control Panel.  At the time of purchase, a key point they tried to stress was that the move would not change anything for cPanel. Less than a year later, cPanel is now moving to a new licensing model that looks very similar to Plesk's, minus the option for unlimited accounts.  This notice of change came roughly a month ago, informing all users of cPanel Control Panel that the price increase were coming and they were coming fast (like August 1st fast).

How much of an increase are we looking at?

The cost of the license for cPanel is now tied to the number of accounts you have on a server, and scales accordingly.  For some providers, that means that the cost of the license has gone up over 300% for the same number of clients on the server, effectively killing any margin the provider had on the server.

Holy Smokes! What can be done?

To adjust for this, we are seeing many of the larger providers scramble to create their own control panels to manage their servers and cut the costs.  This is great for larger providers who have the staff on hand that can make these adjustments, but the short time frame means that they will be having issues pivoting all their customers quickly to the new panels, and from what we have seen so far, none of them are at the level of completeness of cPanel.

The other option, which is the one we are going to be moving forward with is to adjust our packages and prices to account for the increased cost.  For Shared and Business Shared plans, that means there is an increase of $1/month.  This goes into effect today for new customers, but for our existing customers, the new prices will take effect after January 1st, 2020. That means that your next bill after January 2020 will reflect the price increase.  We did not want to jump the new prices on our customers as fast as cPanel had done for us, and we understand while it may only be $1/month additional, there is a need to budget.

For Cloud customers, we will be including the 5 domain license with our current plans, and if a customer needs a higher tier of license, there will be an additional cost.  We will be contacting Cloud customers directly who have over 5 accounts currently to discuss options for them.  Unfortunately because of the level of increase for license, those changes will take place next month for our current Cloud customers.