On July 2nd, 2019 cPanel announced a massive pricing increase that will apply to all partners. They are claiming that pricing has not changed in 20 years and that a price increase is long overdue. It saddens us how disconnected Oakley Capitol (the new owners of cPanel, Plesk and WHMCS) is from the ever changing landscape of the hosting industry. They are correct with today’s hardware web hosts are able to allocate more accounts per server. What they fail to understand is 20 years ago we charged $20 per month for a shared web hosting package, today we charge $5. Many of our competitors and even our own customers charge a lot less.
The hosting industry is very competitive. Unfortunately, there has not been enough competition for control panels such as cPanel or Plesk in order to keep them in line. With the switch to virtualization products such as VPS, cPanel should have a windfall of additional revenue and customers coming in. Unfortunately they never changed with the times. They never focused on a cloud based software package, in addition they never caught onto the WordPress movement and let hosting companies with internally developed control panels with customized features for WordPress that include staging and live environments gain momentum. These tools alone outpace cPanel focused providers such as Ynorme.
It’s a shame that cPanel a company we heavily relied upon, has failed in so many ways and now in order to offset declining revenue they are proposing a price structure that will result in upwards of an 800% increase for some of our customers. It’s hard to process how that decision can be deemed a strategic business move.
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