On July 2nd, 2019 cPanel announced a massive pricing increase that will applies to to all partners. While cPanel were delighted to announce this, its partners were effectively stabbed in the back.

If you’re a cPanel partner and were paying $11 per cPanel license for each server and running 1,000 websites, you’ll now have to pay $122. That’s approximately a 1000% price rise!

According to cPanel’s new pricing, here’s the breakup for 1000 websites :

  1. $32 for 100 accounts
  2. $0.1 each for 900 accounts

Oakley Capitol who purchased cPanel on August 2018, an already owned Plesk boasts about “Backing businesses they believe in” and “Having an entrepreneurial mindset” on their website. With the purchase of these companies, Oakley Capitol investors now have over a 98% of the market share in web hosting panels. In my mind, this is as close as you will get to a monopoly. When greed is good, and you have a monopoly, there is only one thing to do.

It’s a shame that cPanel which was heavily relied upon in the industry has put the blame on its partners for their declining revenue and to sell to Oakley Capitol. Both Oakley and Nick Koston (CEO cPanel) announced that they have the same vision so the new pricing structure was carefully planned. Nick knows the hosting industry very well, so would have expected the response from the hosting community. While an incremental price increases are expected from providers from time to time, this sudden and dramatic pricing increase has put almost all hosting companies in a very difficult position. I am aware that many have been consequently destroyed and Nick knew the impact this would cause.

Many hosting companies shared over 3,000 comments on WebHosting TALK  who only see this a greedy money grab crafted by Oakley Capitol and cPanel. Hosting companies. It was only after a huge backlash from its partners in response to the new pricing that a representitive from cPanel offered this response.

Will the price increase add any value?

According to cPanel they “aim to increase product performance and develop features to generate more value for the customer”. Looking at the forums almost 90% of user requested features remain un-actioned. This means they place very little priority on user requested features while giving the impression that they are working through those requests.

Despite making statements like “aim to increase financial performance and develop features to generate more revenue from the customer” there is very little evidence that this put this in practice.

Because there is no real competition, CPanel/WHM effectively runs as a monopoly and puts profits ahead of any other priority, it basically abuses the operating costs for small to medium hosting companies.