cPanel Price Change and the Impact on our VPS Plans
As you may have heard, at the end of June, cPanel announced they will be raising their licensing fees while also changing the metric in how they will sell their software going forward. Essentially this means an increase in monthly cost for everyone with existing licenses. And no, there is no grandfather option. All licenses will be converted to monthly at some point.
Social Media, WHT community and Reddit have been abuzz since this announcement with mostly negative sentiment. Web hosting companies of all sizes who have built their business around fixed cost expectations are very fearful for what this new price structure means to the future viability of their business.
What Happened with the cPanel Prices?
In the past cPanel always used a simple pricing structure with a flat rate for a VPS license and a flat rate for a Dedicated Server license. This flat rate was applicable regardless of the number of accounts hosted on a server. Historically cPanel charged a fee of $15/mo or so for a VPS and $25/mo or so for a Dedicated Server where each license supported an unlimited amount of domains.
As per the initial pricing change, announced on June 27th, licenses no longer include unlimited cPanel accounts per server and cPanel has adopted a ‘Per Account’ licensing model.
The new pricing structure started about $5-10 more per license while also capping the number of domains hosted on a VPS or Dedicated Server to 100 and charging $0.20 per additional domain over and above.
This may result in an expense increase anywhere from 150% up to nearly 500% for web hosting companies depending on their infrastructure setup and business model. Some business owners on Web Hosting Talk are referring to massive 900% monthly increase.
Updates to Account-based Pricing
A little more than a week after cPanel unleashed their biggest price increase ever, cPanel released a fresh announcement. Multiple things went wrong in the initial announcement, and they realized that as well. It addressed the recent backlash they faced as a result of their previous announcement on June 27th, introducing an imminent price hike and fundamental change to how they will bill users going forward.
This second announcement was an acknowledgment that they misstepped and miscalculated how their new pricing would impact their core customer base and underestimated the amount of support that some of the Community members require to implement the new licensing model changes. While cPanel has not gone back to their old pricing and there is still a price increase, they have made some concessions and brought some clarity to how their new billing will work. The company has already announced a revised version of its new licensing model.
cPanel New Fixed Pricing Cost Model
cPanel introduced fixed cPanel Premier Packages starting with 100 account licenses, and they are making additional packages available in 50 account increments (i.e., 150, 200, 250, etc.) for customers where auto-scaling is not a good fit. To avoid a disadvantage in comparison to auto-scale pricing, they are offering these fixed price packages at a discount.
When Does The New Price Kick In?
The new pricing for partners will start on September 1st, 2019.
Will FastComet Eventually Leave cPanel?
For over 20 years, cPanel has become industry standard and leader when it comes to web hosting management software. Veteran webmasters and novices alike love the power cPanel and WHM offers, including the ability to activate new web technologies with the click of a mouse. According to BuiltWith, cPanel has over 3 million users and is used by over 900,000 live websites.
The reality is that no other web hosting management software has even come close to the features and functionality that it provides. cPanel’s popularity is because of its integration with services we use and love like Softaculous, PHP Selector, JetBackup, CageFS, CloudLinux, BitNinja, and much more. This has helped cPanel become faster, reliable, secure, and feature-rich.
We are committed to offering cPanel to our customers in a way that makes sense for FastComet and our customers, and of course our future customers. Our customers’ peace of mind, quality of life and prosperity are paramount to us. Our goal is to make sticking with the cPanel control panel you are already familiar with and love, painless for you.
Now that we have the new pricing structure we can restart the process of analyzing how it will impact our customer base and figure out what, if any, changes we ought to make to it. Our goal is to make our offerings as attractive and as easy as possible for you all.
What does this mean for Cloud VPS customers
Rest assured! None of our Cloud VPS cPanel pricing will change until October at the very earliest. You will not see any lapse in FastComet’s exceptional service and addon offerings.
What does this mean for Shared Hosting clients
cPanel will still be included free of charge with all of our shared hosting plans. We are working hard to create our own pricing structure that brings back the predictable fixed costs for cPanel that you know and love. We will be in close touch with our customers and the public regarding our pricing changes as we adapt to cPanel’s changes.
Stay tuned
We hope this has provided you with some clarity on the situation. We’re working on finding the best solution at the moment. Follow our blog for an upcoming personal update from our CEO that would bring light on how to make these changes manageable.
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Elena oversees all Marketing, Product Management and Community efforts for FastComet and is in charge of telling the brand's story. Always pitching, she’ll share the FastComet vision with anyone who’ll listen. Elena helps our customers make the most of their web sites' and focuses on our inbound marketing efforts; everything from developing new online growth strategies, content creation, technical SEO, and outreach within the FastComet community. Her background includes Sales and Customer Relationship development, as well as Online Marketing.
Comments (16)
Thanks for this amazing article about cpanel price changes impact.
Thank you for letting us know. We will let all the clients know who use FastComet this change is underway and should be using a license with they have a certain amount of cpanel accounts. Thank you!
We greatly appreciate your continued business and support through this time of growth and change. Feel free to contact us via our LiveChat in case you need any further assistance on finding the most suitable licensing plan for your needs. Our team is 24/7 available!
I was pretty shocked to see my monthly amount go up by 150% . I’ve done comparisons with other hosting companies that offer the mid range package (Shared hosting) and its about 10.00/11.00month if just paying monthly and not annually. if I pay three years up front at host gator I can get in at 3.95 for 3 years, or 6.95 for two years or 8.95 for one year. month to month is 11.95. Fast comet’s best rate is 5.95/month for a one , two or 3 year purchase but monthly is 14.95 — but the BIGGEST issue with that is its a huge jump from the 5.95 Ive been paying. I love FastComet’s customer service for the most part, they’ve been fantastic and Ive always given great reviews but today my site was down, my emails were down – i was in appointments all day and couldnt figure out what was going on — logged in and live chat said ‘prices increased’. That was it. Just really crappy. 5.95-14.95 is a big jump .
Dear Moonrise Azalee,
I appreciate you coming here to comment! I was not able to find an account with the name you have listed here so I am not able to provide more details on the case. Of course, I can assure you that the issues you have reported do not correlate with the updated renewal pricing.
From what I understand you have been a customer of us for some time. This means that you may have noticed that we have improved our shared hosting environment a lot during that time. Even though we kept developing the service by adding technology, features and security enhancements, the pricing remained the same since the beginning. Given the improvements introduced, however, we had to adjust the cost, which will not only allow us to keep offering the same outstanding service but to further improve it as well.
Our price is the market price – most of the serious hosting companies in this segment offer a similar pricing model. We do not differentiate with a low price from our competitors, but with our high quality of service. Providing quality service always costs. If you carefully check the provided offers by the competitor companies as an example to your statement, you would be able to notice that the very same plans renew at $9.95/mo.
So in other words, if you find something that works for your business, there is no reason to change. According to these calculations, it’s more cost-effective to stay where you are, as the cost of moving outweighs the saving you might make.
We would hate to lose you over this, especially feeling pleased with our services.
Regards
We greatly appreciate your continued business and support through this time of growth and change. Feel free to contact us via our LiveChat in case you need any further assistance on finding the most suitable licensing plan for your needs.
It’s not even the price on it’s own it’s the increase– I can’t afford yearly payments so I’ve always paid monthly. My monthly payment here at FC has been 5.95, then yesterday I saw my phone was giving me a ‘failed to connect’ to my domain email address. I couldnt check out what was going on until evening as I was at a day long appointment with my son. When I got home I investigated, saw that there had been a 14.95 invoice for this month that failed to go through and so my sites were shut down. Talking to Live Chat, I asked why the amount was almost 3x more this month and she said because prices went up. Nothing else added. She told me she would take 60% off of this month’s invoice. And yes my Disqus account isnt associated with my real name. sparkwithin dot org is the base account name, although that specific domain is no longer hosted here – but one of the sites i host with you is inthewind dot ca .
One of the reasons i chose fastcomet was because of their price lock guarantee. But that has changed! My renewal cost is more than doubled. I do not think that is integrity on fastcomet’s part. The price increase is just too much.
Dear Ashook,
You have been with us for more than for around 2 years already and have had the chance to evaluate the service, and hopefully, we have shown you how much we care about our customers.
We are truly thankful to have such long term customers like you and we appreciate your business.
Indeed there was a price difference between the initial price and the renewal price communicated
earlier this year after years of no price alteration. At first glance, this could be confusing, but there is a good reason for that, which I would like to point. The real cost of all the services you are have been benefiting from, however, is far above the promotional rates, this is why the renewal comes at the regular rates.
I know that it is very hard to make someone happy when they learn a higher price apply, but the truth is this is an inevitable economic fact of life. In order to provide the services that our members rely on, and so that we may continue to evolve and excel, we must take meaningful steps to scale growth. After all, if an economic model is not sustainable long-term than it is not a viable economic system. The “same renewal” promotion can not last forever on this market but we truly wanted to postpone it as long as possible.
Jeez! please dont word play us to death! These ambiguous statements about vast improvements of your service is dismissive to peoples real concerns. The fact that my yearly cost went from $55 to $120 with no warning or explanation is unacceptable. Telling us that anyone else offering lower prices must not be “serious hosting companies” is ridiculous. This seems to be the FC way. At every turn you guys get you deflect issues and say it had to be on someone else including your customers. I have been blamed for your own site UI issues. Being told that FC realizes the limitation of having an option to turn on a feature in 2 places but doing so will actually disable the feature, and this somehow was no ones fault but still my fault somehow.
I moved on to what I guess is not a “serious hosting company” because they offer a rate much better than FC. This really just comes across as a chance to grab as much new money as possible while being able to point the finger at someone else.
Your company is absolutely disgusting and negligent in how it has handled the change in cPanel pricing. It is clear your marketing, customer service, and support teams, all had AT LEAST 30 days to provide sufficient and unavoidable notice to existing customer, and instead made a blog post. Wow, you guys are really impressive.
Not only have you let your customers have their servers taken down completely out of the blue, you expect already paid in advance accounts under the old pricing and T&C, to cough up cash in the middle of the night to get our clients website back up and running. Bravo!!!!
SHAME ON YOU. We will make sure all our employees, and as many of our 10’s of clients voice the disappointment we feel on Twitter, BBB, Facebook and Trustpilot.
Dear Jaden,
We appreciate that you have been our customer for a long period and the trust you have put on us. We make every effort to make sure our service is excellent and we regret we have fallen short of your expectations. We have reviewed your case thoroughly (including your complete ticket history), and we would like to address your concerns accordingly.
We would like to stress that none of your hosting plan rates will be/is increased mid-contract. What is more, there is currently no planned price update concerning the Cloud VPS / Dedicated server renewal rates. What you refer to is the updated licensing fees concerning a third-party product.
The whole industry has been buzzing about the cPanel license updates that became effective September 1, 2019, for months. A lot of companies took emotional decisions by stating that they would be abandoning cPanel completely going with alternatives such as Direct Admin or their own custom builds. Others stated they’d be discounting their reseller hosting packages. There also those who have decided to increase their web hosting rates. It is important to look at the situation at hand with a clear mind.
It took us more than one month to be just able to close our NOC partnership agreement with cPanel. This agreement allows us to provide cPanel licenses under the new Terms and conditions required by the vendor. Due to continuous issues on cPanel’s end regarding licensing matters, transfers from official resellers of cPanel were put on hold. This led to increased licensing cost that was applied to us. To make the transition even harder, cPanel’s Customer Service team was inundated with a high volume of requests that have caused additional delays in the process. During the transfer process, based on the circumstances, all of the license fees and 300%+ increased rates applied by our former cPanel license provider were covered by FastComet.
Regrettably, when you rely significantly on a third-party then you need to be prepared for the consequences of that third-party doing everything – from changing their software and pricing, to even going out of business. And whatever they do that could potentially affect your business and you have no choice but to accept it.
We would like to assure you and our customers alike that all our Cloud VPS and Dedicated server plans will be running on a fully-licensed cPanel version. All Cloud VPS/Dedicated Servers clients with up to 5 cPanel accounts will keep the same monthly rate, as we will cover the cPanel Admin Cloud license tier. Clients using more than five cPanel accounts will need to upgrade their cPanel licenses to the corresponding license tier according to their needs.
Please note that in no way we aim to put you or cPanel at fault for the situation. We just tried to explain the causes of the issues you have experienced and make sure that others aren’t mislead.
Regards,
FastComet
This response is pure garbage! You want us to continue to pay for the license that you say is included for free (still on your website by the way)! You say we have had months to be prepared because you created a blog post and yet you can’t even remove the false advertising from your website! Also, It says right on the cPanel website what the costs will be. You are giving us 5 accounts with our package now? Well, that is $20/month. If we need more, we can’t get a discount from cpanel for the $20 package to add to it. So, for example, if I want the 100 account license, that is going to cost me $45/month. That means I don’t need your $20/month 5 account package. Therefore I should get $20 off my monthly charge. Or, better yet, if you scroll down it says that any place that hosts more than 1,780 accounts can get them for $0.10/month. I would hope you have that many accounts as a company. This means you should be able to provide me with 100 accounts for only $10/month. But based on this above response and the response I am getting from your support team, you guys are using this to make even more money off your loyal customers. I agree with Jaden, SHAME ON YOU! This is utterly ridiculous. I have hosting accounts with many other providers and I haven’t seen a single increase across the board. In fact, one of my VPS accounts is now cheaper than it was before.
Dear Donald,
I completely understand your frustration and how the sudden change in the cPanel license offering changed expectations for you. The simple truth of the matter is that we do not feel any different than you about those pricing changes. Their announcement came as a huge surprise to us, and such a dramatic change was unexpected for the entire hosting industry.
Keep in mind that the changes were applied on the 1st of September, while you have experienced the issue now. This means that we have been paying two or even three times the official price of all our cPanel licenses during the previous month, in order to keep all our clients’ projects operational.
But regardless of how we feel about all of the cPanel pricing changes, our decisions are based on what is in the best interest of our current and future customers. Even though it may not seem that way to you (considering the current situation), we value each and every client of our company and we always strive to be as transparent as possible.
All our Cloud VPS and Dedicated server plans are running on a fully-licensed cPanel version. There is no false marketing in this statement. All Cloud VPS/Dedicated Servers clients with up to 5 cPanel accounts keep the same monthly rate, as we will cover the cPanel Admin Cloud license tier.
Our hosting product is much more than the bare servers under it. And our pricing reflects that. We provide value by adding new features and tools to our plans and upgrading regularly our technology, without charging extra for these enhancements. Our Cloud VPS hosting plans went trough several major upgrades for the last couple of years that included increased RAM, CPU and space quotas, and came with easy scalability, to meet the ever-evolving needs of all users.
For web hosting companies, software licensed from third-party vendors makes up the most substantial part of software asset costs. While this change means higher pricing for some, Cloud VPS and Dedicated server users actually get a discount. Let’s get down to numbers:
Premier Package ? Up to 100 Accounts ? $45/mo (https://cpanel.net/pricing/)
Premier Fixed Package ? Up to 100 Accounts ? $32.00/mo (https://cpanel.net/wp-content/themes/cPbase/assets/downloads/cP_Partner_Licensing_Guide.pdf)
FastComet cPanel Premier Cloud 100 ? Up to 100 Accounts ? $30/mo
I believe the above mentioned numbers clearly show the savings you receive as a FastComet customer.
I do not intend to argue with you, as I personally completely understand your frustration. Still, I do not agree that we do not value existing customers. Our main priority and mission are to provide our clients with smooth and satisfying customer experience both with our support and our services. We are sorry that the answers provided did not appeal to you. Regrettably, although we do our best to provide our customers with the best customer success, sometimes we fail to exceed those expectations due to various human factors.
Regards
Plesk is also a very good alternative to cpanel and with the upcoming new version obsidian it will be much better. The WordPress Toolkit and the ability to clone websites with one click are great. Would you offer a managed Plesk plan I would switch to you. I know that your support is great.
Hey Christian!
Thank you for submitting your take on this matter.
Sometime back in 2018, Oakley Capital had acquired cPanel. This move effectively brought both cPanel and Plesk under the same umbrella, as Oakley Capital also happens to be the parent company behind Plesk. Plesk as a cPanel alternative is a common suggestion among the web hosting community following all the licensing changes.
Plesk is indeed quite versatile, has a solid directory structure and its navigation is great. In my personal opinion, it’s one of the prettiest panels available, and there’s no doubt that it provides a flawless user experience. But still, it is a competitor that plays in the same team.