Today I had some time to catch up with my mail and found a mail from KnownHost which I missed somehow. From that mail I found out that cPanel is going to increase their prices AGAIN. Since the last price change didn't do much harm to their customer base it looks like our dear cPanel Co. has decided to milk their customers more. This time they have changed their pricing model from per-server pricing to a per-account. So if you have lots of cPanel accounts this gonna hit really hard. This probably effectively stop any cPanel based free hosting if there are any left.

So it will be like,

• For 5 accounts – $20/month
  
• For 30 accounts – $30/month
  
• For 100 accounts – $45/month + $0.20 for each additional account
  

It's little bit cheaper if you are partner with cPanel like for 5 accounts it's 12.50 for month and for 30 it's 30 etc. So if you run shared hosting this makes you just lost benefit you got from volume. Now volume makes you loose money. This gonna hit hard for shard hosting providers who used to pay just 12.30 per month per server.

Here is link to image of cPanel mail for their clients with the wonderful news.



I really hope DirectAdmin will make their panel better so many could migrate to them. I haven't used them for years so maybe they are better now. Don't like Pleak personally. I think they are over priced. I don't know if anyone posted about this before it's couple of months but I would like to hear from our sponsors that what they plan to do.

I don't know why they are doing this but at the end everyone is just gonna shift to DirectAdmin, Does it not feel like cPanel is giving advantage to other companies like directadmin. I have been with Buyshared for 3-4 years now and now they have increased the prices and their sub-account policy is really weird. Some of my friends run hosting companies and they are saying this price increase is forcing them to leave cPanel completely, Buyshared have introduced free migration to DirectAdmin
Similarly like TeamSpeak3 when they closed their free licence and introduced their new weird license MANY people instantly shifted to discord without any doubt.
It's gonna be hard for hosting companies and especially from free hosting companies i'm sure we are gonna be seeing DirectAdmin alot in soon time.

I think this is a bad move for the panel corporate, not sure what they were planning when they approved such a move.

Then again, 2020 has been nasty for alot of companies and every company has had to try new tactics to stay afloat, maybe cPanel had no other choice left?

Thanks for letting us know @xdude.  I picked up on this through Gigarocket of course as that meant the end of free shared hosting there - or better put - the last straw that broke the Giga shared hosting camel's back.

cPanel is definitely pricing themselves out of the market.  I don't even know whether it's really that justified.  The Panel is good, put is it THAT good?  It has many imperfections.  For starters because of it being around for so long, there are so many tools in the Panel that shouldn't be there any longer or should be straightened out and retooled.  It makes it heavy to install, not so easy to navigate for beginners. For me any panel that requires tutorials for one to have an understanding how to use it, is not a user-friendly panel.  I didn't even like cPanel's Support Forum that much.

So at the price it was before 2019, I think the price for a cPanel License was justified.  But now I think it's crazy.  I really sincerely hope people will move away from cPanel.  So yes, DirectAdmin is probably an alternative, but why go from one monopoly to another, as DirectAdmin is a bit clumsy and also needs plenty of straightening out.  I personally really like CyberPanel for a viable alternative.  And it can be free as well as paid. So yes, DirectAdmin because it is there.  But maybe we need to dig deeper and do better.  I've done the DirectAdmin learning curve, and complicated comes to mind.  One has to jump over a few hurdles first before it can be relied upon similarly to cpanel.  In the meanwhile there may be better solutions available.  And one should probably keep looking around to make sure we're not turned into a slave of the next panel that may move in a similar greedy direction.

(12-24-2020, 05:37 PM)xdude Wrote: So it will be like,

• For 5 accounts – $20/month
  
• For 30 accounts – $30/month
  
• For 100 accounts – $45/month + $0.20 for each additional account
  

Small companies will be f up then. $20 for 5 accounts means $4/account. That's huge. $30 for 30 accounts means $1/account, seems fine but not really. $45 for 100 accounts means ~$0,5/account, for me it's totally fine.

My current shared hosting provider only sell their starter plan (one with lowest feature) for $1,2/mo. Fortunately they're a big (well not so big but can be considered as big hosting company) company and have more than 100 domains with cPanel hosting active. So it should be okay for them to be charged $0,5/account. Probably they will increase the price for starter plan to $2/mo, still OK.

But this pricing will be very hard for small companies that have less than ~50 accounts active. So they have to charge their client more to cover the server fee too. Such an unfortunate for them.

It's going to be hard for those who run cPanel VPS like me too. I have been paying a flat fee of $5 per month for my cPanel in VPS. Both of these price changed haven't effected me since my provide has some sort of agreement with cPanel. So in the mail they said as long as it's and old client and have less than 200 accounts we won't have to pay more.

They only do it because they know they almost have monopoly in the market. Last time people panicked but many decided to stay but I think this time things gonna change. Anyone who has to pay 30 or more per month might move to DirectAdmin since they offer unlimited accounts for 30 usd/Mon. For small like Medium size developers who take care of clients hosting will find direct admin is pretty good. They don't have too many features like cPanel but I think now it's pretty good for the price. You can check their user and Admin account demos here,



Here's the discussion about this at cPanel forum. Some will stick with cPanel but this time they will loose some big business.



We are too used to cPanel so it's so hard for us to get used to any other panel. Right now I'm testing CeyberPanel and wanting to sort of few problems I have. I might totally move to that one in future.

I've a premium reseller plan with Jordy and he'd informed me of this hike months ago, well this isn't the first time cPanel is shocking it's users. The previous one was even harder to digest for users, and most free cPanel hosting companies ran out of business.

It's true that cPanel plays a monopoly in the market, DirectAdmin is in no way even closer to cPanel in terms of features and utilities, it's sad that we do not have a equivalent competitor to their product and thus they dominate.

Personally speaking, if I were given a choice I'd go for cPanel even that it might be twice the price of other panels.

We see this in the market when a company get's a little too big for its trousers and we see a market shift of more cost effective products and more indie projects in comparison. This has happened with vBulletin where you price a 97 Toyota Corolla as a Tesla and people start looking for open source options to fill their needs as a jumping off point.

I think there are a lot of alternatives to cPanel, if you need something free to use you can check GitHub for open source software...

Maybe this price increase will boost the contribution on these open-source alternative! Who knows.

(12-28-2020, 08:04 PM)LightDestory Wrote: Maybe this price increase will boost the contribution on these open-source alternative! Who knows.

That is true and makes me happy.  I just wish that people do do that, instead of going for an easy alternative like DirectAdmin.  I wish all computer users can get away from the Microsoft / Adobe / Apple etc etc herd mentality of following a big name instead of thinking creatively and for themselves.  I'd far rather support someone who tries to be creative and does it within an Open Source Community, than empowering big names such as Microsoft and Google.  Only reason these big conglomerates are getting away with this is because people who can afford to pay the price are paying for big licenses to keep them in power at the expense of those who cannot afford it.  Which is exactly what has been happening with cPanel. Your large companies who are using cPanel are funding this big price increase to the detriment of those who cannot afford to pay the license. Something needs to be done to break that "greedy spell".