cPanel's new license format surprises the hosting industry

By now most hosting providers and many of their customers should already be aware that cPanel, one of the leading web hosting control panels, drastically changed their licensing structure beginning in September.  Most hosting providers would agree that having not changed their pricing structure in almost 20 years, cPanel was far overdue for doing so. Licensing changes aren't really uncommon for software products in continuous development but the price increases many hosting providers are feeling as a result of this change are staggering. This is especially true for smaller quality-oriented service providers who cannot easily absorb a 100%+ cost increase.

What’s changing?

cPanel’s original announcement was posted to their blog in late June, with a conciliatory update the following week, providing a few additional options to placate their partners, but not really much in the way of assistance for the smaller non-partner customer groups. In the end, the standard non-partner rates will be as follows:

• Solo - $15/mo - allowing only a single cPanel account
• Admin - $20/mo - allowing up to 5 cPanel accounts
• Pro - $30/mo - allowing up to 30 cPanel accounts
• Premier - $45/mo - includes up to 100 accounts, with additional accounts costing $0.20 more each

For large-scale hosting providers, the amount of additional revenue cPanel will be generating with this pricing model is bewildering, with projections easily exceeding 400% increases for many major companies, resulting in thousands of dollars every month.  For a few real-life examples, see the following tables of possible provider scenarios:

* Before partner discount, requiring an ongoing monthly commitment, accepted application, and other stipulations

As you can see, cPanel’s new licensing model greatly increases their revenue from large-scale shared-hosting providers.  When viewed at a cost-per-client level, increasing costs by a mere $0.11 per client doesn’t seem like a big deal, but any company who would have to suddenly plan for an additional $30k or even $2k of monthly operating expenses would see this as a huge problem, especially since most hosting services providers sell their service in yearly increments (or longer) and therefore wouldn’t be able to immediately pass on the cost of this increase to their customers to prevent impact on their immediate revenue stream.

It also unfortunately has the potential to result in growth-prohibitive cost increases for smaller quality and service-oriented providers who generally have fewer accounts-per server and thus a much higher cost-per-server increase as a result of this new structure.  To further complicate matters, service providers that target developers and resellers will be even more greatly impacted as they will be immediately responsible for paying additional license costs when their clients add enough cPanel accounts to move them to the next tier, or varying licensing costs for large resellers with cPanel accounts varying month-to-month.  Traditional hosting agreements and payment systems aren’t designed with variable licensing costs in mind, and so even beyond the additional costs for the new licensing structure, hosting providers also have to spend research and/or development man-hours to adjust their billing processes to accommodate the new structure.

What happens now?

As a result of these changes, many hosting providers have publicly voiced dissatisfaction and considerations for moving away from cPanel to other control panel options, or decided to temporarily discontinue selling new cPanel licenses until they have restructured their own pricing structures to pass on the license cost to their clients.  Assuming you are a cPanel user, you also will need to decide whether or not to continue using cPanel for your server(s) or to migrate your sites to another alternative.  

Please don’t misunderstand - cPanel is still one of the most user-friendly and functional control panels around, and finding an alternative that does everything cPanel does is not easy.  The closest comparable control panels for nearly the same feature assortment would be 

• Plesk - formerly one of the largest competitors to cPanel, but less so now that both companies are backed by the same investment company; Oakley Capital.  Plesk matches cPanel nearly feature-to-feature (exceeding cPanel if you include support for Windows, MSSQL, etc) and is a definite candidate for a cPanel replacement for anyone feeling so inclined. Like cPanel, Plesk has supported a migration utility for years that is capable of migrating accounts from other control panels. Steps for doing so from cPanel are documented here in their help center.
  
  
• DirectAdmin is a very close third-place option for most administrators, but may require additional plugins and a bit more command line experience than cPanel and Plesk typically require.  In light of the recent cPanel pricing increase, DirectAdmin addressed questions about how to migrate from cPanel, and known issues with doing so, in their user forums.
  
  
• Webmin + Virtualmin provides a very similar feature set, but most users don’t find it nearly as user-friendly out of the box.  This may be reduced by using third party themes, and a recently updated theme called Authentic Theme has particularly started turning heads.
  
  
• CentOS WebPanel (CWP) may just be the perfect free control panel option for a privately hosted server, although it’s not intended for resellers or shared hosting at this time. CentOS support is provided under a tiered pricing structure, so you may need to do a bit more reading to keep this option free, but then again that’s fairly common for free control panel options anyway. Like DirectAdmin, CWP has provided documentation to help with either migrating cPanel accounts to CWP, or even converting your cPanel server into CWP (take backups, and proceed at your own risk).
  
  

If you choose to migrate your websites, and need assistance in backing up your sites or with the migration process, Cozaq’s support team can help. Reach out to us by clicking the Submit a Request here, or at the top of the page.  If you choose to stick it out and stay with cPanel, we can only hope that these extra fees will spark growth and expansion to cPanel’s already industry-leading platform.