MASSIVE cPanel price increases

[gei]

In case you haven't heard yet, cPanel/WHM just announce some insane increases on their licensing prices:

https://cpanel.net/wp-content/themes/cPbase/assets/downloads/cP_Store_Licensing_Guide.pdf

Basically they will now charge a (much higher) flat fee, as well as a per-account fee. Prices for most people will go up at least 3-4x, if not more.

Virtually every provider will have to increase prices because of this. Since WHMCS is now owned by the same company that owns cPanel, they are likely aware of the issues this will cause and probably working on fixes - ie how can we know what to charge resellers each month if we need to pay for every single account they create? 

FYI Oakley Capital now owns both WHMCS and cPanel, so it's likely that these two products are going to pivot to just try and extract as much money from customers as possible going forward.

To say I am massively disappointed would be an understatement. This could be the beginning of the end for cPanel, and will likely push a ton of smaller hosts away from them. Sad day for the web hosting industry.

[Mechanic]

This is a sad day for the hosting industry.

cPanel has a monopoly in the industry and they are squeezing out whatever they can. This is not a price hike, it's holding us hostage.

[bear]

2 hours ago, gei said:

it's likely that these two products are going to pivot to just try and extract as much money from customers as possible going forward.

Next thing you know they will have a "marketplace" or something to upsell external services to your customers. (psst, it's already here, and ongoing)

[MarceloPe]

I really hope cPanel reconsider those price policy as it's ridiculous. and will seriously damage the hosting industry.

Also, please WHMCS don't take the same measures.

 

[gei]

12 minutes ago, MarceloPe said:

I really hope cPanel reconsider those price policy as it's ridiculous. and will seriously damage the hosting industry.

Also, please WHMCS don't take the same measures.

 

Considering that they are owned by the same company, I think it would be prudent to start looking into other billing options as well.

[gei]

1 hour ago, bear said:

Next thing you know they will have a "marketplace" or something to upsell external services to your customers. (psst, it's already here, and ongoing)

Sarcasm fail? There's a fairly dramatic difference between offering clients optional upsells and dramatically increasing the licensing prices of a system they are more or less locked in to.

[bear]

39 minutes ago, gei said:

There's a fairly dramatic difference between offering clients optional upsells and dramatically increasing the licensing prices of a system they are more or less locked in to.

Anyone is free to move to a different control panel (though not Plesk, as it's the same owner) or billing system and get away from onerous or unacceptable changes.
The point was this that you'd apparently missed: " just try and extract as much money from customers as possible...". Cpanel is following the same path as WHMCS here (or was CP first?). Do away with owned licenses, base cost/price on number of accounts within, make the cost substantially higher overall, and offer a "marketplace" for selling additional software within the app(s). What CPanel has done, however, is going to be really damaging to many providers.

Both companies (WHMCS and Cpanel) offer third party products in this manner, whether it's Cloudlinux and kernelcare or Wix and SSL certs...it all amounts to getting more money from the users/clients, and through rather unpopular methods.

[MarceloPe]

If you meditate it a minute or two, you will discover that the new price structure charging for EVERY extra panel... IS NOT A FEE. IT LOOKS MORE LIKE A TAX: cPanel will charge YOU some kind of tax for having too many accounts in YOUR server, where enabling a new account does not represent any extra job or effort for them, because the new account is just a collection of configuration files sharing the same engine that is already installed. 

Wanna know another issue this new price creates? If a company owns dozens of cPanel servers with a varying rate of new/exiting customers, how can one sleep peacefully if the monthly subscription of lots of its servers will vary every month? Just imagine the chaos with the PayPal subscriptions. This means having to closely monitor the monthly expenses and due dates to add enough funds to cover the payments, or recreating those subscriptions from time to time due to the price variations. This absolutelly don't happen with the current price scheme.

 

Edited June 28, 2019 by MarceloPe

[Juanzo]

Hopefully this kind of sad measures makes cPanel competition grow, and allow us to choose better alternatives in the future.

[Remitur]

cPanel site is down right now, but I was able to get few details about new price.

New monthly price for a VPS seems will be 45 $ + 0,20 for each user account above 100

 

[DennisHermannsen]

9 hours ago, gei said:

Also, please WHMCS don't take the same measures.

They already did. Kind of.

WHMCS price model was changed last year, I think. Instead of having branded, unbranded and fulltime, you're now invoiced based on how many active clients you have... And can only pay monthly. The thing is, WHMCS is something you only need 1 (or maybe a small amount of) licenses for, while you need a lot for cPanel.

Our cPanel license costs just increased by 500%. We're going to pay almost half of what we used to pay per year - but now per month!

I've heard that some hosts are going to need to find more than 70.000$ more for cPanel after the new price model.

[MarceloPe]

4 hours ago, DennisMidjord said:

They already did. Kind of.

WHMCS price model was changed last year, I think. Instead of having branded, unbranded and fulltime, you're now invoiced based on how many active clients you have... And can only pay monthly. The thing is, WHMCS is something you only need 1 (or maybe a small amount of) licenses for, while you need a lot for cPanel.

 

Yep, but WHMCS price structure IS way more intelligent than cPanel have been today. WHMCS license is something you definitely can pay, and you will continue to be able to pay. Imagine WHMCS charge you for every new customer after the first 1000 ones. Even if it is $0.01, THAT would be abussive, and THAT is what cPanel is trying to do. Plainly unfair.

 

Edited June 28, 2019 by MarceloPe

[sgonzalez]

Very sad day for hosting companies.. We trusted cPanel for years and now they didnt even think about us.. just a massive increase and survive if you could.

[wsa]

Soon WHMCS.com do the same also :)

[MikeP]

In my own opinion, I feel people are blowing it way out of proportion.  Only the hosts that are offering hosting for $1 will suffer, and so they should.

All you need to do is add the $0.10/12 or $0.20 into the hosting package or absorb the pennies, surely you are profiting enough to lose a maximum of 20 cents per account.

I completely agree that jumping from per server to per account pricing is absurd, the way they've done it is terrible i.e. overnight.  Nonetheless, it's not a huge issue, if you like cPanel and respect them, deal with it, else find somewhere else to take your business.

WHMCS will have to react to this change since they are apart of cPanel.  However, WHMCS already counts the users on each server under the "Product/Services -> Servers" area.  Not sure how that will work with external license providers, such as BuycPanel and others.

Just my 2c 🧐

[Remitur]

 

 

 

7 minutes ago, MikeP said:

 

WHMCS will have to react to this change since they are apart of cPanel.  However, WHMCS already counts the users on each server under the "Product/Services -> Servers" area.  Not sure how that will work with external license providers, such as BuycPanel and others.

 

The number given there by WHMCS is the number of services, not of account.
For a single service in cPanel you can have dozen of accounts.
Or you can have a reseller account, who create hundreds of accounts, and WHMCS will never know it.

[MikeP]

That only stands for reseller accounts, not standard web hosting account.

I'm guessing they'd add support for reseller accounts as well through a counter somewhere or another.

[Bertie]

Not everyone is a $1 host and yes the prices will affect more than just those hosts. The price increase is quite insane when you work it all out. Even for those who just want to host a handful of sites. At the end of the day, there are reasons why they are getting a lot of bad feedback on this and so they should. 

Edited June 28, 2019 by Bertie

[twhiting9275]

5 hours ago, MikeP said:

Only the hosts that are offering hosting for $1 will suffer, and so they should.

Not true, in the least bit.

Over the past 17 years, I've worked hand in hand with some pretty awesome providers, and some not so awesome ones.  The end result? They will all be quite affected by this, and, none of them are  "offering hosting for $1". A few prime examples:

A2 offers reseller accounts , allowing users to sell from 40 on up to 100 accounts, at reasonable prices.  Those plans just got affected hugely
MOST major providers pack their servers full.  We're talking 300+ accounts, per server.   This is far and beyond the 100 max that cPanel has outlined. The hardware can take it, obviously, but this just placed cPanel at more expensive than the server hardware, in many cases
Then, you have small shops like myself. I've been a one man show for years (though I do work for and with providers occasionally to pay the bills), but my own VPS licensing just doubled.
Now, let's talk retention.  I've long warned hosts that keeping clients for 30+ days after they don't pay is, well, just not good practice, yet some of the best in the business do it. Why? Because they want to be "nice".... Well, not so much any more. Why should they pay for keeping the client's data?

This isn't being "blown out of proportion". If anything, it's being drastically ignored. The affects that this is going to have, across the industry are astounding. From a 200% price increase on up to 900%+ , simply because someone in charge said "do it". cPanel is an industry leader , and the PTB should have taken the affect this will have on the industry into account.

Now, will this drive the price of hosting up? Sure. It'll get rid of a few of the bottom feeders, but it'll do more to turn cPanel's name into mud than anything. The "I'm moving" list is already growing very, very long, and major providers (at least one, Ramnode) have stopped offering cPanel altogether


 

[twhiting9275]

17 hours ago, Remitur said:

New monthly price for a VPS seems will be 45 $ + 0,20 for each user account above 100

 

You shouldn't have more than 20, 30 accounts on a VPS. They got that one right, actually. Anything more will need a dedicated server. 

Just saying

[MarceloPe]

1 hour ago, twhiting9275 said:

Now, let's talk retention.  I've long warned hosts that keeping clients for 30+ days after they don't pay is, well, just not good practice, yet some of the best in the business do it. Why? Because they want to be "nice".... Well, not so much any more. Why should they pay for keeping the client's data?

Absolutelly. That specific topic only will be forced to be shorter. Forgetful customers will now be punished the hard way. 

Being "nice" to your customers will end up inflating the costs of your business. cPanel want us to be bad 🙂 

I have 4 words for cPanel: ABUSE OF DOMINANT POSITION

 

[Remitur]

 

 

 

8 hours ago, twhiting9275 said:

You shouldn't have more than 20, 30 accounts on a VPS. They got that one right, actually. Anything more will need a dedicated server. 

Welcome back in the 21st century hosting industry!!!!
In what planet did you spend last 10 years?  🤣

Dedicated physical servers nowadays are used just as virtualization infrastructure.
Our own hosting infrastructure is done by a dozen of physical servers (dual exa-core, 180 GB RAM, no local storage but four fibre-channel to a SAN); another third-party infrastructure we're using has physical nodes with 1 TB RAM each...)
The typical VPS we realize for shared hosting has 24 GB of RAM, about 800 GB of storage, 12 vCPU. And about 400 users on each of these VPS.
We had about 6 cubic meters of old servers, which have been substituted by the new infrastructure years ago.
Since then, less issues, and better customer satisfaction. 

Competitors which remained on physical servers went to bankruptcy years ago.

[Remitur]

 

 

 

6 hours ago, MarceloPe said:

 

I have 4 words for cPanel: ABUSE OF DOMINANT POSITION

 

You're right, but IMHO the new management overestimated its "dominant position".
 

My own position about it: if they are not going to run back in a couple of weeks, I have a couple of month to find a fix (using only yearly cPanel licences, most of them going to expire between September and january 2020)
I'm simply evaluating what other control panel use instead of cPanel (most probably DirectAdmin), and the same is doing a number of other hosters... 

It seems that we need:

• seven to 10 days to plan migration activity
• 4 hours each to migrate every single server

Very little time to destroy a "dominant position" ... 😉

 

[bear]

14 hours ago, MikeP said:

WHMCS already counts the users on each server under the "Product/Services -> Servers" area

The largest issue will be the resellers, VPS and dedicated server licenses, not those having to do with plain shared accounts.
Keeping track of plain shared accounts on a server is simple, as is charging to cover them. Where this runs into big problems is a reseller (for instance) jamming hundreds and hundreds of accounts onto a box, and suddenly having to pay per account rather than one known license fee. WHMCS tracks the reseller account, but not the accounts that account creates on a server. If you're charging $20/m (as an example) for a reseller account, and they have sold 400 accounts, that's an extra $80/m (assuming the server already has 100+ on it) to you, the server admin/owner. You're out that $60 unless you think you can tell them they owe it. 
If you'd been limiting accounts per reseller all along, less concerning, but still will require onerous billing changes.

[MikeP]

Guess I forgot about the other hosting options.  I agree with everyone that it's a crazy move on cPanel's side, maybe they'll reconsider and follow Plesk's pricing where there is still an unlimited option.

Who knows - can only hope and pray.