CPanels price increases for webhosts

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martyyn

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#252754 10-Jul-2019 11:55

Anyone have any thoughts on this ?

I started looking after a few local business seven years ago and now have 30-odd sites on a JoneSolutions reseller account. They were recommended on here at the time, have a good reputation elsewhere, and to be fair they've been pretty good with only one outage of any real note in that time.

However this weekend they decided, like many other hosts have/will, to move from CPanel to DirectAdmin as a result of the price increases after Cpanel's sale.

It's not been an easy migration to say the least. No settings were migrated so anyone with custom DNS has been down, DA doesn't give the same level of access which restricted me tracking email issues and as I've just found out uses different "rules" to decide what any WordPress DB usernames should be so the odd site is having database connection issues.

I've done my fair share of warehouse migrations and most of the issues have been down to how little effort JS seems to have put into it. They've been good to help fix the issues, but that's not the point.

Last year I started to put new clients on my own Vultr VPS and put email through O365, but I'm interested to hear peoples thoughts on it as a whole.

kingjj

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#2274290 10-Jul-2019 19:56

Wowzer, I didn't realise they had changed their pricing so dramatically! I've just checked a couple of resellers and they still have the old licences at the old prices (VPS $15, Baremetal $35) but I imagine that will change over time. I have a Cpanel licence for a personal server, if I am forced to move to a different licence than that will be the end of my relationship with Cpanel.

Direct Admin has always seemed like the poor cousin to me, but it often has newer features first (like Nginx integration) and is arguably as secure if not more secure than Cpanel.

Glad to hear JonesSolutions is still going strong! Used them for several years before upgrading to a dedi.

irpegg

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#2274364 10-Jul-2019 22:34

There is major outcry on the cPanel forums, some peoples licensing costs have gone up 800% it's absolutely insane. Considering cPanel was just bought out by the same hedge fund that owns Plesk, it's worrisome that Plesk may also go down this route. The whole going from yearly subscription -> yearly subscription is classic hedge fund BS where they just come in, run their standard business plan template, make cuts, drive the bottom line to the extreme and then leverage or sell it off.

As you've stated many are looking at DirectAdmin, and unless they've done a major overhaul recently, DA is absolute garbage and i would shudder migrating services into it. It just sucks because we're stuck in this duopoly.

I feel bad for the small hosts out there as the licensing screws over a lot of these guys who probably run on no profit or bare minimums. Imagine being a small guy who just started traction to find out your licensing cost has gone from $250 a year to now $67 a month (these are the actual figures people are quoting), you can see a lot of these guys upset and making their voices heard. You'll probably see those $4 - $7 plans now have another $1-2 adding on so people are going to be shopping around and probably just fall into public cloud services as they believe it time to embrace the future.

mattwnz

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#2274378 11-Jul-2019 00:02

With all the disruption and time involved, as well as stress and downtime, I would have thought it was false economy to switch to something else, that didn't have the same level of features. Then you have the learning curve of a new control panel, and customers may hate the new control panel and may then switch providers. Also all the extra support required to show customers how to use the new control panel, and all the issues they will no doubt have, as support is one of the biggest costs to a business. PLus rewriting tutorials and guides etc. Cpanel is pretty good compared to the others I have found. Doesn't Plesk already use this pricing model? Basically it is the end customer that has to pay the increased cost, so will likely means that prices will have to increase.

danfaulknor

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Prodigi

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#2274380 11-Jul-2019 00:07

We run some cPanel servers, and while I'm not changing to a different panel, I'm definitely consolidating a few servers to cut down our (new) license costs

they/them

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bigalow

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#2274381 11-Jul-2019 00:31

have you had a look at webmin ? its free

it does about the same as DirectAdmin Cpanels does

also Usermin Virtualmin Cloudmin are from the same maker as webmin

have a look at webmin.com

NPCtom

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#2274384 11-Jul-2019 01:32

I host about 120 clients on a dedicated server and the cPanel licenses fee is covered by my host so it doesn't really affect me. Although I am creating my own control panel with similar features to cPanel and it currently looks great.

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premiumtouring

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#2274399 11-Jul-2019 06:38

NPCtom:

...and the cPanel licenses fee is covered by my host so it doesn't really affect me...

Famous last words!