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CPanel the well-known control panel for Linux Hosting management announces an important change in pricing policy that will inevitably lead to an increase in prices.
Specifically, new prices will be launched starting from 1 September 2019 (for renewals) and immediately for the new licenses.
This news has caused a real earthquake within hosting companies, and has already led to the bankruptcy of some companies given the increase in prices that in some cases depend on the use of cPanel in the company. licensing costs increased by over 1000%.
Let's see how their CPanel licensing policy changes:
Monthly licenses only, no more annual licenses
With this new policy, any savings that could have been achieved by weighing the annual purchase effectively disappear. This alone leads to an indicative increase of over 10%, in fact going to be unable to save.
Price linked to the number of active user accounts
Above 100 accounts per server in addition to the old price of $ 45 per month, a fee of $ 0.20 is added for each additional account.
A well-equipped enterprise server on non-demanding systems that use 500 sites to run on a single machine goes to have an extra cost of over 80 euros.
The motivation for this choice could derive from the increasingly frequent choice of investing greater economic resources on more performing servers capable of hosting several hundred or thousands of sites with a single panel and therefore of limiting the cost for the CPanel.
Doing this instead with a additional accessory cost of € 20 per month for every 100 additional domains this practice up to now widespread becomes in fact useless.
To give you a practical demonstration of what we have written let's go immediately to see the old pricing directly from their site:
and immediately below the new pricing from their current website:
Consequences for Hosting Providers and insiders.
Except for those few large groups that boast hundreds of thousands of licenses that MAYBE be able to negotiate on the price, for all medium-sized companies, they will only have to adapt to the new pricing policies with all the organizational problems that will ensue.
If we think of machines of very low cost operators that hosted 2000 websites on a single server at the additional cost of the CPanel license of $ 45 per month, today we find ourselves spending 425 euros per month, to manage the same amount of sites, with a cost literally multiplied by 10 times.
It is obvious that what will have an important impact on Hosting providers and suppliers may have consequences for the final customer.
Consequences for Hosting Provider end users.
The consequences for the end user of a Hosting Provider could be quite harmless for those who currently manage a few domains or very profitable projects in which the possible increase is not statistically significant on the pecuniary values involved. However, a classic example of those who have registered and managed on CPanel for example only 10 domains, will have an increase of about 24 euros a year, a considerable figure for all those who, for example, use CPanel only to manage DNS as also typical of some Italian hosting provider.
Could Plesk be an alternative?
For those who still do not know from January 2019 as reported by https://hosting.review/news/cpanel-oakley-acquisition/ Plesk and Cpanel belong to the same company.
It is therefore likely that a change in pricing will take place shortly also on Plesk, effectively eliminating an unlikely competition on prices but instead standardizing a price increase given the positioning of these two high quality products which are in fact the best choices for all those who decide to use a professional and commercial control panel for systems management.
The criticisms were not long in coming
The hot comments of the insiders who today learned of the news were certainly not long in coming, going to incriminate this radical change in pricing given that CPanel is in fact a pillar of those who have decided to provide hosting services in a " marriage ”with this control panel that seems destined to take a bad turn.
Unfortunately it was not just an initial alarmism and we are already starting to see the first real problems of companies that declare they want to switch to other products in order to avoid bankruptcy with some specific situations in which prices have increased by more than 1000% making all unmanageable from an economic and entrepreneurial point of view, especially on low cost plans.
The topic was so important in the Hosting sector that it even bounced on TheRegister:
Here are some of the most significant posts that have appeared on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/OXHEBERG/status/1144555883088818176
One of the moves of the Oakley Capital investment group
Oakley was founded in 2002 by Peter Dubens, an entrepreneur who wanted to create a financial partner who would understand the needs and ambitions of the business founders, a partner he himself wanted to work with. In 2007, the first fund was raised with David Till, to encourage and support entrepreneurship.
It is this entrepreneurial heritage that sets us apart. We attract our like-minded businesses and build strong partnerships with their management teams, investing our time and experience, as well as our capital, to help them grow and succeed.
We support outstanding companies in a wide range of industries across Western Europe. Oakley has a distinctive track record in three industries: technology, media and telecommunications (TMT); Consumer; and education.
To better understand the situation it must be said that the Oakley Capital investment group has acquired and manages WebPros.
WebPros is the company that currently manages the two Hosting control panels that share more than 2019% of the market, CPanel and Plesk, since January 50.
They also bought WHMCS
On June 3, 2019, WebPros also acquired WHMCS, one of the best CRM software products used by internet service providers ranging from consulting services, purchasing, deploying to billing, payments perfectly integrated with CPanel and Plesk as well as many other control panels such as DirectAdmin, ISPConfig and the like .
The announcement can be viewed on the official website https://blog.whmcs.com/133551/whmcs-is-joining-webpros of which we report the following image:
The stakes are down, nothing is right
It seems that the investment group wanted to strive to acquire the entire ecosystem of hosting reseller panels on the market, going to take over the main two Plesk and CPanel that WHMCS with which they are fully compatible and the most appreciated combination.
It is to be assumed that support and development for other control panels other than these two (Plesk, CPanel ed) will gradually be limited, pushing the market towards the two solutions in order to improve profits.
Time will tell.
