Important cPanel Pricing Changes are Coming

cPanel, the company behind the cPanel control panel used by Web Hosting Canada’s hosting services, has announced an important pricing change for their software earlier this year. We wanted to take the time to clearly communicate its impact to you.

How are prices changing?

cPanel is changing its pricing for its license partners (like WHC), which in turn forces us to pass along the changes to our own clients. Depending on the service you use, here is how your pricing will be affected, starting January 1, 2020:

Existing Web Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting plans will not currently be impacted by the price increase.

When will this pricing change take place?

While cPanel has pushed these changes earlier this year, WHC has absorbed all price increases until January 1, 2020 in order to give you the time to adjust accordingly.

Starting January 1, 2020, WHC will issue a new invoice to cover any price increase for the remaining term of your affected service. Future invoices will reflect the updated pricing.

How can I see how many cPanel accounts I am using?

The easiest way to see how many cPanel accounts you are currently using is by connecting to your Administrator control panel called the Web Host Manager (or WHM for short), available in your Client Area, and clicking on List Accounts. This will list all the accounts on your server, along with a total count.

Why is this pricing change happening?

cPanel’s Official Explanation

1. The new pricing model represents a more accurate reflection of the actual use of their platform, where systems with more users (or accounts) require more support and more complex features.
2. Charging a fixed price per “server” no longer makes sense in 2020, where sophisticated cloud systems could potentially host tens of thousands of accounts, and be charged the same price as smaller servers hosting a single account.

A Historical Explanation

On August 20th, 2018, cPanel signed an agreement to be acquired by a group led by Oakley Capital. The group also owns Plesk, a competing control panel. Through this acquisition, Oakley now owns the two largest commercial hosting control panels in the industry, giving them an imposing market share and enabling them to push for price increases now.

Web Hosting Canada remains committed to delivering high value at every turn and as such we’ve put together a few suggestions of how to help you navigate the cPanel price increases.

How to Reduce the Impact of cPanel’s Price Increase

While we can’t stop the pricing increases slated to come into effect, here are some things you can do to minimize its impact if you use either Reseller Hosting, Cloud Servers or Dedicated Servers:

Terminate Any Unused or Dormant cPanel Accounts

Given that cPanel's pricing change results in a monthly charge based number of unique accounts; unused and test accounts will needlessly increase costs.

From WHM, review cPanel accounts using "List Accounts", and terminate any that were used for testing purposes, or that are no longer needed.

Terminate Suspended Accounts

Delete suspended accounts if you don’t need them. A suspended account is billed the same as an active account. Consider performing a backup first, just in case your client changes his mind!

Use Addon Domains

“Addon” domains within the same cPanel do not get counted as separate cPanel accounts, so consider removing smaller standalone cPanel accounts and instead hosting them into addon domains in another one of your account.

Do keep in mind that the process of moving a separate cPanel account into an addon is relatively complex and can have serious security and performance implications. Use only in specific cases and always proceed with care!

Consider an Alternative Control Panel

If you rarely use your website or control panel and the cPanel pricing change negatively impacts you, you can consider switching your service to DirectAdmin.

DirectAdmin is a lightweight commercial control panel that offers most features available in cPanel, at a lower cost. Switching control panels involves spinning up a new server, configuring it, migrating all your accounts and (usually) updating their DNS. This is not a trivial task, nor is it one we necessarily recommend. However, WHC can and will assist you with the steps required to undertake such a migration, should you choose to perform one. Reach out to our support team for assistance.

Web Hosting Canada’s Take on the cPanel Price Increases

While we understand the need to adapt the software’s pricing model to better reflect the new types of hosting platforms available, we’re disappointed by both the scale of the increase and the speed at which cPanel has decided to execute it.

On a positive note, the adapted pricing model does ensure a fairer pricing according to your actual use. The adapted pricing model should theoretically help cPanel continue to improve its already high-quality platform with additional useful features, improved security, and better performance, at least in the short to medium term.

Should you have any questions or concerns about how the cPanel pricing increase may affect you, please contact your WHC account representative. As always, we’ll do our utmost to assist!

Happy hosting,