cPanel licensing and pricing changes
cPanel, the vendor of arguably the world's most well-known Linux web hosting control panel, announced significant changes to their pricing model back in June of 2019. When it was announced on their discussion forum, it generated 40 pages of discussion due to the significant impact in cost the change would be having on service providers.
Many service providers opted to ditch cPanel altogether and by now have done so. We considered that for a time, but ended up deciding to stick with cPanel. For the year and two months since cPanel's announcement was made, we have been absorbing the increased cost. This was done primarily due to the complexity of integrating our systems with the cPanel licensing system in order to keep track of and auto-upgrade/downgrade licenses based on number of accounts per server, and several other items that we wanted to complete before doing so (such as the new website we've finally rolled out.)
It's now time for us to overhaul our pricing. This will affect managed vps clients primarily. Shared hosting remains unchanged. (Reseller hosting plans have been restructured around the new pricing as well, but existing reseller accounts will remain as-is until at least 2021.)
Prior to this change, all Managed VPS offerings included cPanel with unlimited accounts in the base cost. Now they will include the first tier of cPanel cloud licensing (cPanel Admin Cloud Tier, up to 5 accounts total).
There are four levels of pricing. The list below present those four tiers along with our pricing (compared to cPanel's standard pricing):
| License Type | Our Price (added to VPS price) | cPanel's Price |
| cPanel Admin Cloud (5 accounts) | Included free | $20/month |
| cPanel Pro Cloud (30 accounts) | $8/month | $30/month |
| cPanel Plus Cloud (50 accounts) | $16/month | Not available |
| cPanel Premiere Cloud (100 accounts+) | $24/month + $0.20 per account over 100 | $45/month + $0.30 per account over 100 |
As you can see, we're doing our best to keep the impact of this change as low as possible.
We are currently linking licenses from cPanel to VPS services in our system, in preparation for the change. We will not make pricing adjustments for at least 30 days, so you can expect pricing to remain unchanged until at least September 11th, 2020.
Pricing will be based on the total number of accounts hosted on your VPS. If you have 5 accounts, you'll be assigned a cPanel Admin Cloud license. If you have 6 accounts, you'll be assigned a cPanel Pro Cloud license.Over 50 accounts and you'll be assigned the cPanel Premiere Cloud license, and once you have over 100 accounts, those above 100 will add a $0.10 to the license cost.
Please open a support ticket if you have any questions about these changes.
NOTE: cPanel raised their pricing yet again since this was written, and this article was updated to reflect new pricing as of 06/18/2021.
