Absurd cPanel license price increase

Murmaider

Murmaider

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Oakley Capital, the holding company for cPanel, WHMCS and Plesk has sent out an email yesterday evening detailing their new pricing increase on cPanel which is moving from a per vps or per dedicated server fixed cost to a per account basis.

The cPanel website is currently being DDoS'd, as soon as it's up I will link to their announcement, but in the meantime, here is the new cPanel Licensing Guide

How big is the impact? well If you have a VPS with say 500 accounts, your pricing is moving from $15.00 (R219 p/m) to $45 for the first 100 accounts and then $0.20 per account after that. so $45 + (400 accounts x $0.20) = $125 per month ( roughly R1825).

If you have a dedicated cPanel server with say 1000 accounts, your new cPanel pricing will now be up from roughly R600 per month to R3300 per month.

We ourselves (Domains.co.za) are seeing a 350% increase overall in our cPanel licensing costs as a cPanel Partner. On some of our reseller servers we seeing a 700% increase. Some providers are reporting over 1000% increase.

This is a massive blow to the hosting industry world wide as the entire market is going to have to go up in price.
Switching to Plesk isn't going to help much, since they all owned by Oakley Capital.

From the onset, it looks like the idea of unlimited accounts for resellers is going to have to be curbed and changed to fixed accounts where the number of accounts are billed for.

Your thoughts community?

Dave@ Domains.co.za
 
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This is madness. The price of shared hosting is literally going to sky rocket overnight worldwide. No point in moving to Plesk as you said its owned by the same company. This is a massive blow for the hosting industry. Even switching to another CP or going opensource is a tough one as clients are used to CPanel.

We have a reseller account with you guys keep us informed of new pricing structure.

Sad news indeed.
 
@adam_g - It is complete madeness, they just Sparta kicked the entire shared / reseller hosting industry into a hole.

We will keep all our customers updated, we are still busy investigating the entire impact of this and how we are going to deal with this.

Regards,
Dave @ Domains.co.za
 
This is greed at it's worst. I feel sorry for all the hosting providers out there. cPanel has everyone by the balls. Even if there was a comparable panel out there, I imagine that it would be a nightmare for larger providers to move over.

Bye bye affordable reseller hosting, cheap Cpanel hosting etc. The sad thing is, even if cPanel loses a large number of their clients, they will still win in the end. Disgusting
 
This is a complete cluster **** of note for all shared hosting providers and the industry as a whole.
We saw a similar move when Parallels purchased other control panel providers and stopped support for the products that they had purchased and pushed everyone towards plesk

Strategic move from the head hunchos at Oakley Capital who knew they were purchasing a captive audience and then hiking the fees without any notice.

Not too sure what laws are applicable to this within the UK with regards to anti competitive practice but this would definitely fall within this kind of practice if this was done locally.

At the end of the day, resellers are going to suffer.
Thanks for posting @Murmaider
 
/sub'd

For a lot of people like me who have a website for the custom domain name on email, not really using the website (but keep ownership in case it may be used in future), this will mean a higher monthly price? Then I will have to rethink whether it's worth it.
 
ChalkCheese said:
This is greed at it's worst. I feel sorry for all the hosting providers out there. cPanel has everyone by the balls. Even if there was a comparable panel out there, I imagine that it would be a nightmare for larger providers to move over.

Bye bye affordable reseller hosting, cheap Cpanel hosting etc. The sad thing is, even if cPanel loses a large number of their clients, they will still win in the end. Disgusting
Click to expand...

The biggest insult to cPanel partners like ourselves, is they have increased our cost by 350%, but then tell us that because our support guys are cPanel certified, we will get a 2% discount on the 350% increase...
 
Murmaider said:
The biggest insult to cPanel partners like ourselves, is they have increased our cost by 350%, but then tell us that because our support guys are cPanel certified, we will get a 2% discount on the 350% increase...
Click to expand...

Wow so only a 343% increase :eek: Good luck, I'm sure you guys will have a couple of tough decisions to make. I hope this greedy decision bites them hard in the long run, I truly do.
 
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We worked out the cost of our very limited cpanel licenses and at present our licensing jumps from $1,075.00 per server for a 3 year license to $6912 for the same.

Windows shared hosting is going to become extremely popular next year.
 
Hetzner must be giggling over their decision to go with KonsoleH.

ChalkCheese said:
Wow so only a 348% increase :eek: Good luck, I'm sure you guys will have a couple of tough decisions to make. I hope this greedy decision bites them hard in the long run, I truly do.
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2% of 350 is 7...
 
From +-R16125 to +- R103680. Imagine trying to pass that kind of an increase to your clients (in any industry on earth). They will tell you to get F%^#$.
 
I know this does not help your plight but this is exactly what happens when consumers allow a company to become pretty much a industry monopoly.

Eventually the shareholders will pull the trigger to maximize their profit margins and know that the clients will have no choice. This will not end here if people don't start to use alternatives more evenly spread even if the best alternatives might be a bit more limited compared to Cpanel.

The fact is that unless alternatives get market penetration they will not have as much interest either in improving their product.

So its a give a little/take a little situation where hosting companies need to make the right decision and give opensource project or alternative direct competitors to cpanel that is not owned by the same top heavy company.\

Some of the cuff alternatives that companies should look into and if you have your own dev team you should look at the code and develop on top of it so that you don't ever get caught with your pants down when closed source license like cpanel tells you to open up and pay up.

froxler
sentora
vestacp
 
Bryn said:
Off the top of your head, do you have any estimate as to what sort of per domain fee resellers would be looking at?
Click to expand...

The increase is going to be per cpanel account and not per domain.
A cpanel account with 10 addon domains is still only counted as 1 account.
However, I won't say that to loudly in case cpanel start charging on a per TCP packet sent and received.

The cpanel store retail pricing on per cpanel account is $0.20 (~R2.92 excl vat with the current buying exchange rate).
 
Murmaider said:
The increase is going to be per cpanel account and not per domain.
A cpanel account with 10 addon domains is still only counted as 1 account.
However, I won't say that to loudly in case cpanel start charging on a per TCP packet sent and received.

The cpanel store retail pricing on per cpanel account is $0.20 (~R2.92 excl vat with the current buying exchange rate).
Click to expand...

Well if Domains is going to charge resellers R3.50 per account, that's surely not a big deal.

@Murmaider On an unrelated note, what do you think of a service like Cloudbric? Hetzner sells the R150pm addon to seemingly everyone, and the Cloudbric website looks pretty convincing. Is this type of addon something Domains has considered or thinks is worth the money?
 
Bryn said:
Well if Domains is going to charge resellers R3.50 per account, that's surely not a big deal.

@Murmaider On an unrelated note, what do you think of a service like Cloudbric? Hetzner sells the R150pm addon to seemingly everyone, and the Cloudbric website looks pretty convincing. Is this type of addon something Domains has considered or thinks is worth the money?
Click to expand...

Why would you pay for cloudbric if you can get a much more robust system that does all of the same things and even more for free ?

The Pro plan is $20 a month so about the same cost as cloudbric and I would trust cloudflare additional features and network strength over this cloudbric service that cost the same.

Worse part with cloudbric you are locked in to using hetzner services. Using a top level service that forces you to use a specific host is just a crappy idea.
 
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