On 27th June 2019, cPanel emailed their authorised partners and other vendors about their massive price increase which was published to be with immediate effect, thus causing a massive price hike to entire web hosting industry including shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS and Dedicated server business models. Below is the copy of one such email sent by cPanel to its partners and other vendors:

Today we are excited to announce that we’re shifting to an account based pricing and licensing structure, and to share what that means for your relationship with cPanel. We aim to simplify the process of adding new servers, make it easier to become a cPanel customer, and provide value to a broader group of users.

Introducing Account Based Pricing

The hosting industry has changed a lot in the last 20 years, and has long out-grown the licensing and pricing structure that we have used at cPanel. Effective immediately, cPanel’s license structure and the way we price our products is changing. Our pricing and licensing structure will now be standardized for all of our customers and include multiple Tiers. This new structure defines the price of each license based on the number of Accounts hosted on the server, reflecting the value received by the owner; now, customers pay for only what they use. On September 1st, 2019, we will introduce Auto-Scaling Packages, Fixed Packages, and transition all existing monthly licenses to the new account based pricing and licensing structure.

Starting today, we are moving all customers to monthly billing. As yearly licenses come up for renewal, we will convert these licenses to monthly licenses unless you choose to have these licenses expire by changing the settings on the List Yearly Licenses interface in Manage2.

For yearly license conversions after September 1st, 2019, the conversion options on the List Yearly Licenses interface in Manage2 will reflect the new licensing structure with the opportunity to select an Auto-Scaling or Fixed Package. The default selection will be an Auto-Scaling package based on your server’s environment type (Metal or Cloud).

Above price increase has collapsed the entire business model for several web hosting companies out there who have been offering web hosting with cPanel control panel on their servers. Especially the reseller hosting market, where resellers were able to create unlimited cPanel account for a reasonable monthly price, are now going to get hit by this per account based price increase by cPanel.

Customers who had the privilege of creating unlimited cPanel accounts on their VPS and Dedicated servers now will need to thoroughly audit their dormant cPanel accounts and terminate them. If their active accounts are more than 100 as per cPanel pricing structure, they will need to bear the price hike as well.

We at RShosting are no different when it comes to using cPanel. We have been using WHM cPanel with our Shared, Reseller, Managed VPS and Dedicated server plans where there was no such restriction of accounts to be created till now. However, with the huge price hike from cPanel, we are now evaluating our business models to cope up with revised pricing of cPanel while at the same time, with an intention of causing minimum inconvenience to our existing customers.

We will keep posted with our intended business models and possible solution here, to cope up with the cPanel price hike.