MASSIVE cPanel price increases

[Remitur]

18 hours ago, DennisHermannsen said:

It is. There's one group of people that I've noticed complaining about the price increase the most - new, smaller webhosts who offer webhosting for almost nothing (some of them less than a dollar). 

Cheap, entry level hosting (15-20  bucks/year) does exist.

I guess that websites using such kind of hosting are millions worldwide; it can be provided in an "honest" way, it is legit, and there's a number of players (big, less than big and very small) providing it.

Maybe hard to profit from it, but there are lot of commercial reasons to provide it... This is not argument of debate.

With new cpanel's prices, providing this kind of service is simply impossible.

 

[DennisHermannsen]

14 hours ago, Remitur said:

Cheap, entry level hosting (15-20  bucks/year) does exist.

Yes. I'm not saying it shouldn't exist. Let's say that these cheap providers only host 100 clients per server (<Removed by WHMCS Moderator - Offensive Language>), that would mean each cPanel account costs 0.45USD per month. That's 5.4USD per year. That's still a profit from the 15USD per year.
Now, let's say they only hosted 100 clients per server with the old pricing model, that would be 0.2USD per month or 2.4USD per month. If these 3USD per year per customer is what's ruining your business, you need to rethink the business model.

Edited October 17, 2019 by WHMCS ChrisD
Removed by WHMCS Moderator - Offensive Language

[Remitur]

 

 

 

 

2

21 minutes ago, DennisHermannsen said:

Now, let's say they only hosted 100 clients per server with the old pricing model, that would be 0.2USD per month or 2.4USD per month. If these 3USD per year per customer is what's ruining your business, you need to rethink the business model.

In a hosting plan which is over 50 bucks/year, 2.4 USD/year are quite little (but still 5% ... which is no so little, in any business model)
In a hosting plan which is 15 bucks/year, 2.4 USD is over 15% ... for just a little piece of the toy.
Other than Cpanel, there's to pay CloudLinux, a decent antimalware/antivirus, the VPS (do you know any hoster providing VPS for free?), the backup service, the server management... so it's unrealistic say "you have still a profit"... (BTW, it's the same argument which was argued by cpanel's guys... so I guess that there was a little misunderstanding between old cpanel's CEO and new management, so they truly think that just cpanel is sufficient to setup a hosting business... 😄 )
No, the real profit, if you're smart, may be a couple of bucks... so if cpanel ask for 2.4 on its own, you're loosing.
But the question is: for such kind of business, is cpanel necessary? No, it's not: there's plenty of other products, equally good for this kind of job, which are free or available at an affordable price.
And cpanel is loosing all of them. And they're mainly not moving towards Plesk (as Oakley's guys had maybe planned), but towards other products.
I'm ready to bet that 2020 will be the last year that cpanel (as company) will close: during 2021, cpanel will somehow  disappear.

 

[DennisHermannsen]

4 minutes ago, Remitur said:

In a hosting plan which is 15 bucks/year, 2.4 USD is over 15% ... for just a little piece of the toy.

Talking percentages when dealing with such small numbers is not the way to do it. A very tiny increase in licensing fees would have the percentage go up and look like a big change. And my point was that it's only a loss of 3USD per customer - it sounds like a lot when the customer only pays 15$ per year, but the fix is really easy; place more than 100 customers per server (which they already do). These providers were already paying very little in cPanel licenses before because they had many customers per server.

Let's say a small hosting company offers cheap web hosting. This company has 2000 customers, 4 servers with 500 on each. That's $20 per server in licenses per month towards cPanel (a total of $80). Each customer pays pays $15 per year for web hosting. That's $30.000 total. Subtract the 12x80 USD you have to pay in licenses to cPanel ($960) and you have $29.040.
With the new licensing prices, you'd have to pay an initial of $45 per server per month ($2.160 total per year). Now, the license only covers the first 400 accounts, and we have 1600 more. 0.2x1600 is an additional $320 which means we end up with a total of $2.480‬ in licenses for a year - in percentages, it's a lot more to pay.

If we instead host the double amount of customers per server (1000 customers on 2 separate servers) we only need an initial pay of $1.080‬ for the licenses. After this, we need to add costs for 800 extra accounts; 0.2x800 for a total of $1240. That's not even $300 more per year. Plus, migration customers from 4 servers to 2 servers isn't difficult in any way and you could run it in the background during the night.

25 minutes ago, Remitur said:

And cpanel is loosing all of them. And they're mainly not moving towards Plesk (as Oakley's guys had maybe planned), but towards other products.

cPanel might be losing a good chunk of their smaller customers, but my guess is that the vast majority of big customers will stay with cPanel - combine that with the increase in pricing, and I think they will make more money than what they did before. That's what's it's all about as a business. You want to earn the most amount of money, and if that makes a group of customers angry, then * it. It won't hurt the business.

If cPanel had had this pricing structure since day 0, noone would think of it. The problem is that companies now have to adjust to it, and they just refuse to.

[Remitur]

 

 

 

 

3 hours ago, DennisHermannsen said:

If we instead host the double amount of customers per server (1000 customers on 2 separate servers)

You're the one that, one day ago, wrote:

Quote

It has been discussed multiple times, and most people say that hosting more than 200 customers on the same server is just plain stupid.

So, yesterday, according to you hosting 200 users on the same server was stupid.
Today, you suggest hosting 500 to 1000 users on the same server ... 😄

I can host 100, 500 or 1000 users on a server: it's me to decide and plan how to do it, and many variables are to be managed in such a decision.

The best way for KISS ("keep it simple, stupid!") is reducing as possible the number of involved variables.

And I (and many others...) are going to reduce thin number simply giving off cpanel.

Quote

If cPanel had had this pricing structure since day 0, noone would think of it.

None would discuss today about it, because cpanel with such a pricing policy would not be the number one (or number two, it's to be decided) as it is, but it would be one of the many little competitors which fight for sharing the 10% of the market... 

[DennisHermannsen]

27 minutes ago, Remitur said:

So, yesterday, according to you hosting 200 users on the same server was stupid.

It's still my opinion. I also think it's stupid to provide hosting for $15 per year.

27 minutes ago, Remitur said:

Today, you suggest hosting 500 to 1000 users on the same server ... 😄 

Only as a solution to people who keep whining about the increase in price and keep screaming about how it will make their businesses go bankrupt. Improvise, adapt, overcome.

27 minutes ago, Remitur said:

I can host 100, 500 or 1000 users on a server: it's me to decide and plan how to do it, and many variables are to be managed in such a decision.

One major concern is downtime. If you have 1000 clients on a server, you're gonna have ~1000 impacted clients if something goes wrong or you need to take the server offline for some reason. That's why I don't like having so many clients on one server, but I understand why smaller companies do it; to reduce costs.

I'd be shocked if cPanel as a company actually cared about any of this. They're going to make more money than they did before. You only really hear the opinion of the people who feel hurt. The customers that are accepting the change mostly won't get involved in these discussions. A lot of companies has other things to do than to waste their time complaining in discussions like this; they know it won't change anything. A lot of the people who said they would be leaving cPanel have changed their minds.

End-customers want cPanel. Companies know this. Last year in February, a known Danish web host was aquired by another, bigger company and all activities had to be moved to the new company who didn't offer cPanel. We got so many requests that month from people asking if we offered cPanel, and our income that month was increased by a whopping 50% (of course this doesn't say much if our income was only $10 - but it wasn't 😉). That bigger company keeps buying other companies (and has also reached out to us to see if we're willing to sell), and we keep getting requests like "Hi! X is aquired by Y and I'll no longer have access to cPanel. Do you offer cPanel?".

cPanel is a major factor for many people when choosing their web host. We know it. You know it. Most web hosts know it. And most importantly, cPanel knows it. Had cPanel not been such a sought after product, they would never had had the balls to pull off such a dramatic price increase... But they do have the balls because they know that people want their product.

 

[stevenvsi]

Well I hope this will foster competition.
When things are all good, somebody needs to screw it, the big bad people are always looking for ways to exploit or destroy.