cPanel is raising pricing yet again!

** Updated on 05/11/2023 **

I am absolutely disappointed by the need to announce yet another price increase by cPanel LLC. This is the fourth such increase since 2019, and it is affecting all cPanel hosting companies.

We ourselves have done everything we can do to contain the increasing costs, which include not only cPanel monthly licensing increases that are now 3 times more expensive than at the beginning of 2019, but our power and internet bandwidth has been steadily increasing as well. The same acquisition by cPanel raised our WHMCS costs over 1,100% as well!

We have absorbed a tremendous amount of impact to our revenue to keep costs to a minimum. We put off the 2019 first price increase until well into 2021, and only increased managed VPS service. This year we had to return our Small and Medium plans to their original pricing and increased our reseller plans.

These minor changes never came close to restoring MediaServe's revenue, but that's okay. We're all about providing an economical service with excellent support and knowledge, as a family owned company, and we have absorbed as much of the rising costs as possible.

However, we now face continued price increases in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic fallout with its increased inflationary pressures, likely even a looming recession, and the devastating affects on humankind world wide. It's an insane increase at this time by cPanel, and we must come up with a plan to mitigate your costs and ours! (I tend to suspect that the acquisition of cPanel by venture capitalists have simultaneously raised costs and lowered market share, and hence requires increases to replace revenue at the market pivots away from cPanel's rejection by many hosts.)

We cannot stave off the cPanel increases, but what we can do is find a way to keep costs at the same level. That means we must provide alternatives to some of our products and platforms. We have already laid concrete plans for this since May 2022, before the latest fourth round of cPanel increases were announced in October.

Here's where we are with those plans:

1. We must increase cPanel hosting due to the 4 increases we've tolerated as much as possible, as well further rising costs to power and bandwidth. cPanel hosting will require an increase to shared hosting services including resellers for $3.00 per month or more depending on plan.
2. cPanel managed VPS service will increase by a whopping $15-19/month or more (see below price table.) The reason? We can no longer heavily subsidize the cPanel pricing, but we will offer a migration to a cPanel alternative to keep the cost of our managed VPS at the same price.
3. We will not increase any cPanel costs until we have provided an alternative control panel solution which is today, Thursday May 11, 2023.

We will continue to support cPanel, but I expect cPanel pricing to increase by at least 10% per annum, as has been the case now or more every year.

The alternative panel is Enhance. Enhance is already powering a few websites of our own and a few MediaServe clients as well. Migration to Enhance from cPanel will be quick and simple, requiring a change of your domains' nameservers, which can scheduled at a convenient time. For domains registered here at MediaServe, we'll handle the nameserver change. For domains registered elsewhere, it will be important to coordinate the migration with your nameserver updates to domain names that have been registered elsewhere.

The Enhance Panel will feature a new and polished user interface, far better organized compared to cPanel. The only significant features lost will be the free Site.Pro and SitePad website builders, the Softaculous Apps Installer, and Mailman mailing lists (used by few). For clients absotely requiring those features, cPanel will remain available at the new pricing.

Wordpress itself will be better supported in the new Enhance Panel at the same hosting price. And we're developing installers for Jooma and Magento currently. Additionally, at a later date, a high performance Wordpress hosting service will be available (at a premium), powered by the commercial, high performance LiteSpeed web server (rather than Apache), and combined with the LS Cache plugin your Wordpress websites will notice significant performance increases.

We will also include offsite backups for managed VPS services migrated to the new panel free of charge. That will reduce the price of a VPS using cPanel plus the JetBackup addon, if migrated to the new Enhance Panel. VPS pricing will remain stable if you choose migration, but cPanel licensing prices will increase.

We will make another announcement once the new Enhance Panel ready for migration from cPanel. When the Enhance Panel is available for migration, prices will not remain the same for at least 30 days from the announcement date, and we'll announce how to request migration from cPanel to Enhance.

FYI our cPanel pricing increased in January for the forth time now, but until we have a simple migration path in place, we will retain the existing pricing, continuing to absorb the increased costs until we can offer the same hosting pricing with a new panel.

New VPS Pricing

Please note that our pricing is still discounted compared to cPanel's higher pricing.

at 12/08/2022, 12:41pm

Updated: at 05/11/2023, 12:17pm

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