cPanel Price Increase And Alternative Control Panels

On July 2nd, 2019 cPanel announced a massive pricing increase that will apply to all partners. They are claiming that pricing has not changed in 20 years and that a price increase is long overdue. It saddens us how disconnected Oakley Capitol (the new owners of cPanel, Plesk and WHMCS) is from the ever changing landscape of the hosting industry. They are correct with today’s hardware web hosts are able to allocate more accounts per server. What they fail to understand is 20 years ago we charged $20 per month for a shared web hosting package, today we charge $5. Many of our competitors and even our own customers charge a lot less.

The hosting industry is very competitive. Unfortunately, there has not been enough competition for control panels such as cPanel or Plesk in order to keep them in line. With the switch to virtualization products such as VPS, cPanel should have a windfall of additional revenue and customers coming in. Unfortunately they never changed with the times. They never focused on a cloud based software package, in addition they never caught onto the WordPress movement and let hosting companies with internally developed control panels with customized features for WordPress that include staging and live environments gain momentum. These tools alone outpace cPanel focused providers such as 1onlyhost.

It’s a shame that cPanel a company we heavily relied upon, has failed in so many ways and now in order to offset declining revenue they are proposing a price structure that will result in upwards of an 800% increase for some of our customers. It’s hard to process how that decision can be deemed a strategic business move.

Current cPanel Prices

Inside Our Datacenter: Dedicated Servers $25 per month | VPS $15.00 per month
Outside Our Datacenter: Dedicated Servers $34.95 per month | VPS $15.95 per month

New cPanel Prices

Package Name: Admin
Max Accounts: 5
VPS/Cloud Only
$14.50 per month

Package Name: Pro
Max Accounts: 30
VPS/Cloud Only
$19.50 per month

Package Name: Plus
Max Accounts: 50
VPS/Cloud Only
$27.00 per month

Package Name: Premier
Max Accounts: 100
VPS/Cloud/Metal/Dedicated
$34.00 per month
Cost per account over 100: $.15

External License prices have not been set but we are considering matching the prices listed inside the cPanel Store.

The price increase is scheduled for January 1st, 2020.

If you are displeased with the proposed price increase, we can help seek alternative control panels that are comparable to cPanel

As you may already know, cPanel is the industry’s leading web hosting control panel, however, it isn’t a free one. cPanel provides a seamless user interface to administer a server or several sites, along with many other automation tools. They continuously are developing new tools that are based upon customer’s requests, all in an effort to achieve overall customer satisfaction on their quest to remain at the top of hosting control panels. Therefore cPanel should be the go-to control panel for hosting companies in a shared hosting environment being that it is easy to integrate with billing systems like WHMCS or Host Billing to automate the service setups. On the flip side, a major drawback to cPanel is that it can only be installed on either CentOS or RHEL based Operating Systems.

Below we have outlined a list of a few paid and free cPanel alternative control panels, that you can use to run your hosting business or to host your own sites.

1) Plesk Control Panel:

This is an alternative hosting control panel for cPanel, although owned by the same company. This is the second most used control panel in the hosting industry and can be integrated with billing systems like WHMCS. Another added advantage for Plesk is that it is versatile in both Linux and Windows Operating systems and can be used in different Linux flavors like CentOS, Ubuntu, etc. Plesk requires a license which comes with an associated cost. Plesk Licenses can be purchased from inside our control panel.