You can’t think about web hosting control panels without thinking of cPanel. With its comprehensive and slick interface, it’s obvious why it’s one of the world’s go-to control panels to help people manage website hosting.
The bad news? They recently announced yet another price increase in December 2022.
If you’re a cPanel partner or simply interested in the world of web hosting, you should know that there’s more to it than just the increase in prices. To get you up to speed, here’s everything you need to know:
It all started when cPanel broke the unwelcome news to their partners.
The web hosting community has once again been shaken in disbelief by the announcement, as they decided to increase their prices for the 4th consecutive year.
While some plans, such as the solo plan, remain the same, most of them increased by 10-13%.
According to the information sent by cPanel, below is an image that shows the new license prices for web hosting partners:
This might not seem like much at first, but the web hosting market is very competitive and has very low margins. So if cPanel were to increase its prices, it would basically affect the whole market (more info about this later on).
In 2018, Oakley Capital acquired a majority stake in cPanel. During this time, the company announced that there will be another layer of billing wherein users now have to pay a monthly fee per license instead of per server. While this didn’t really affect organizations with a small number of users, it’s a different story for bigger organizations. Larger organizations had to pay more, which caused disruptions to their operations.
What’s more, for 2023, cPanel introduced new features to compensate for the price increase. One of these features is Team Manager, which allows cPanel account owners to safely and securely delegate management of different aspects of the account to other team members without having to share login credentials.
The cPanel team is also developing a new product to enable horizontal website scaling. The new product, which primarily targets WordPress-powered websites, will provide failover benefits that will enable websites to resist sudden increases in demand.
Over the course of 4 years, cPanel has steadily been increasing its prices. The price increase started all the way back when Oakley Capital acquired a majority stake in cPanel. There was an indirect price increase due to the new billing system which made web hosting more expensive for those with multiple websites.
After that, the once beloved web hosting company decided to increase its prices yearly, starting in 2020, up to December 2022 and heading into 2023.
cPanel users have been complaining about the price increases, expressly stating that they’re unjustifiable. While a lot of users have already expected to see a price hike for cPanel licenses, they didn’t see prices rising this high.
Here’s what people think about cPanel’s price increase:
With this, a lot of people in different community forums have mentioned that they’ll be switching to different platforms, and are planning to explore other control panels such as DirectAdmin and Plesk.
As mentioned earlier, the web hosting market has low-cost margins, so if cPanel were to increase their prices, everyone would have to increase their prices as well. A simple explanation for why this happens is that other web hosting companies don’t want to feel behind in terms of earning revenue.
With cPanel’s worldwide popularity, they somewhat hold a significant market share. However, we’re seeing the rise of plenty more proprietary control panels with a greater focus on graphics and user-friendliness. Some of our favorites include Hostinger’s hPanel and Kinsta’s MyKinsta.
However, some web hosting companies continue to use cPanel – including HostPapa. Since many may need to follow suit with cPanel and increase prices – they run the risk of losing customers.
As you probably know by now, cPanel is one of the most well-known web hosting control panels among hosting companies and web developers. It’s a popular pick among the community due to their user-friendly and simple interface.
cPanel offers a graphical interface as well as automation tools to help you easily manage your web hosting. It’s also typically paired with a Web Host Manager or WHM, which helps provide administrative controls over the server. WHM also creates multiple accounts, so you can manage more than one website.
If you’d like to learn more about cPanel’s features, check out our write-up on all things cPanel.
cPanel is great thanks to how easy it is to learn and pick up. For this reason, you’ll find that a lot of web hosts use cPanel, namely:
There is no doubt that the rise in price from cPanel has affected not just customers, but the web hosting market as a whole.
A lot of people don’t see prices going down anytime soon, so if you’re a cPanel user, it would be best to plan ahead to prevent the risk of operational disruptions in the future.
