Reseller hosting business is going to change dramatically
On June 27, 2019, cPanel has announced a sudden, unexpected, significant price increase to all licenses.
First and foremost, we want to make it clear that this has nothing to do with us. This is a change that cPanel themselves announced and are imposing to everyone no matter where you have your server and no matter where you bought your license. Within the next few days you will probably be getting a notice from your server/license provider about the license price increase too.
Summary of their change
To briefly summarize the increase, they are no longer offering discounts to VPS licenses, and they are no longer offering licenses that allow unlimited accounts on the server.
Each username that you can login cpanel with on your server is considered an “account”. So if you have 300 users on the server, that will be considered 300 accounts.
All addon domains, parked domains, and subdomains are “not” counted since they are within a cpanel account.
For example, if you have 1 username with 10 addon domains inside it, it is only considered 1 account.
But if you have 10 separate usernames with 1 domain each, it is considered 10 accounts.
To see the number of accounts on your server, you can login to WHM, and click List Accounts, and it will show you the total number of accounts there.
cPanel’s new price and structure is $45 per month and allows up to 100 accounts, and 20 cents for each additional account on the server.
For example, if you have 300 accounts on the server, the license cost will be $85 per month ($45 base price + $40 for 200 additional accounts @ 20 cents each)
These new prices are supposed to take effect as of September 2019.
This change will undoubtedly have a major impact on the hosting industry at every level, mostly hosts that offer reseller hosting with unlimited accounts and hosts offering cheap low cost hosting.
If you have less than 100 accounts on your server, or if you are selling reseller accounts with limited domains, or selling hosting at average prices, cPanel’s price increase will be small.
However, if you are offering reseller accounts with unlimited domains or offering extremely cheap low cost hosting, there are a few options.
This change will result in a major transformation in pricing structure across the board with ALL hosting companies around the world. Since cPanel is imposing this increase on everyone globally, nobody no matter how big or small they are will have any different advantage or disadvantage. For example, the major providers like Hostgator and Godaddy are facing the same problem. Nobody knows how they will handle it but the most common suggestion so far is to just pass the price increase along to the end user. If everyone in the industry does this, then on a per client basis, the increase is nominal, increasing a client’s price by 20 cents is really insignificant.
For anyone considering changing control panels, there’s a few things to think about. Most hosting clients choose companies that use cPanel specifically for it’s reputation and features. Changing to another control panel may cause clients to cancel and lose money, plus the additional training, learning curve, and compatibility/transition/client issues will all cost time and money. Overall, in the end, changing may wind up losing more money than you are saving.
Also, free control panels are highly discouraged because they are notoriously less secure and much more prone to insecurities, and the few comparable paid control panels are not significantly much cheaper anyway. The only major advantage with other control panels is that they do not have per domain pricing, but remember that cPanel never did either until now and they did so because they got big enough to be able to make an industry change like this. Plesk is owned by the parent company that owns cPanel too, so it’s expected that that they will have the same price increase at some point, and eventually other control panels may change their price too. So hopping around from server to server and changing control panels back and forth is not really a good idea.
What to do?
Most importantly, we do not recommend making any decision yet.
Since this change is so significant and sudden, as everyone can imagine, there has been a massive backlash in the hosting industry. Everyone is hopeful that cPanel will reconsider the ramifications and impact that it will have on everyone and change their decision on this.
We are already talking with several industry leaders/large web hosts to see how everyone else is handling this. Again, this affects everyone, both small and large hosts, vps & dedicated server providers, software license providers, and even us.
A few things that have been considered so far are either modifying an existing control panel to replace cPanel or making a new replacement from scratch.
The feasibility and practicality of it largely depends on what decison the majority of the industry goes with.
We will also be supporting alternate control panels as well in case anyone does decide that they want to change.
We will keep everyone posted on options, progress, and the feedback from the industry on a regular basis.
We have over 17 years of experience in this industry and we are 100% confident that we will have a practical solution before the new price change takes effect.
If you have any questions please feel free to open a ticket to the Feedback department and we will gladly answer any questions that you have.
