On Thursday, 27th June cPanel made an announcement that sent shock waves through the web hosting industry.

What is The News?

In early 2019 cPanel were bought out by Oakley Capital, a venture capitalist group. Oakley Capital already had a business portfolio that contained a number of web hosting companies as well as the Plesk control panel. With their purchase of cPanel they now have almost total control of the web hosting control panel market.

Most web hosts were expecting the price of cPanel licences to increase after this takeover but not by the amount that was announced last Thursday.

About The New Pricing

In the past cPanel has always used a simple pricing structure with a flat rate for all server licences. This flat rate was applicable regardless of the number of accounts hosted on a server.

This has now changed and the new pricing model is based on the number of accounts running on each server. This means that the cPanel licence cost for heavily populated servers could increase by as much as 1,000% (yes – that is 1,000%).

How Will This Impact Clockwork Internet clients?

We still are looking at various options but we anticipate that we will move to an alternative, cheaper control panel provider which will enable us to retain our existing price structure.

Assuming that we do decide to move to an alternative control panel provider, any of our clients preferring to continue with cPanel will be able to do so but (regrettably) the cPanel price increase will have to be passed on to those clients in the form of increased hosting fees. We shall contact our clients individually during the course of the next two weeks to determine their preference and a quote will be provided to any client that wishes to retain cPanel.

That said, we are assessing alternative control panels and in particular the DirectAdmin control panel. A move to DirectAdmin would obviate the need for an increase in the cost of your hosting plan as the DirectAdmin pricing is pretty much in line with that of the current cPanel pricing.

However new accounts would have to be created for all of our clients, followed by a migration from your old cPanel-enabled account to your new DirectAdmin-enabled account. We would handle the migration for you. Whilst we would hope, and do our utmost to avoid it, we may have to consider a small fee for this move as it requires quite a lot of staff time.

DirectAdmin

DirectAdmin is a web hosting control panel that has been around for more than fifteen years and whilst it has nowhere near the market share of cPanel or Plesk it’s still a very capable control panel with a good track record. It doesn’t have the same number of features as cPanel but it does the basics very well and we’re happy to use it. It already integrates with CloudLinux, Softaculous and other things that you will be familiar with.

You can view a demo of DirectAdmin here, and if you think the interface may take quite a bit of getting used to they plan to release in the next couple of weeks this new skin that should help cPanel users to feel at home.

When Does The New Price Come Into Effect?

cPanel have announced that the new pricing will start on September 1st, 2019 so any and all moves across to DirectAdmin will have to be completed by 31 August.

We hope this has provided some clarity on the situation. We hate having to raise prices and/or cause disruption to clients but due to the actions of cPanel we are left with little choice but to seriously consider a move to an alternative control panel provider and/or to pass cPanel price increases on to clients who wish to retain cPanel.