As of this morning, BigWetFish can no longer recommend the cPanel Control Panel for your hosting requirements due to policy changes the company have made as of yesterday. We will be working with our clients to offer them alternative solutions over the coming weeks and this article will hopefully explain the reasons behind our sudden change in opinion of what is arguably, the industry standard in hosting control panels.

You may or may not be aware that a number of months ago, cPanel were acquired by a Venture Capitalist Company. It was pretty clear from the time of the acquisition that prices would be expected to rise to help the parent company recuperate the money they spent to acquire cPanel. However, the price increases and changes that have been put forward as of yesterday, and the forceful manner is which it was done, has completely taken the industry by shock. Us included.

If you use Twitter, then search for cpanel and you will see the massive Twitter backlash cPanel is currently undergoing regarding these changes. If you want to join in on the discussion, you can also join the web hosting talk & Reddit discussions at the links below:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1770316
https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/c67n84/new_cpanel_pricing_structure/

So what changes are being made to the pricing policy?
Well, the entire price structure is being changed. Or rather, it was changed effectively yesterday evening in a blog post released by their community manager, and the price changes were introduced and enforced as of that point. Licenses now no longer include unlimited cPanel accounts per server and cPanel has adopted a ‘Per Account’ licensing model. The cheapest license now offered by the cPanel Store is $20 per month and only allows for one to five cPanel Accounts on a server. To host one-hundred cPanel accounts on a server, the license in the cPanel Store is $45 per month. If you want more than a hundred cPanel accounts, an additional 20 cents per month per account over the initial one-hundred.

For an example of just how extreme these price increases are to their previous model; we have one client on a server with ourselves with over four-hundred and ninety cPanel Accounts on a bare metal server. Were that client to keep using the cPanel control panel, the new cost would be $45 per month for the first hundred accounts then an additional $78 per month to encompass the remaining accounts they have. Totalling, under new license regime as shown on cpanel.net, $123**

** cPanel Partner NOC Pricing is slightly cheaper, but even at that, its still be a massive hike of more than double the cost in this example.

But you mentioned this was expected?
A price hike was expected, yes, but a price hike of this magnitude and so abruptly is damaging to all involved. We were expecting prices to increase a few dollars per month but this full pricing restructure has the entire market reeling in confusion and it’s the small businesses that rely on the cPanel hosting panel that will suffer the most from this. There is an outcry in the industry, and this a product we have been recommending for 12 years we now with this seemingly insane management decision on the part of cPanel, sadly no longer recommend it.

What can I do?
Unfortunately, not much. All the control sits in the hands of cPanel. You may want to reach out to @cpanel to voice your concerns on Twitter or via their other social channels.

What are BWF Doing?
Our Senior Management Team met at 9am this morning.  We have a small team of senior staff working on this issue specifically. We’re taking some time for this news to settle and we will be reaching out to all clients personally in the next 7 days giving you various options. Until this time, we will continually be evaluating alternatives and seeing what development opportunities we could take on.

I want to keep my server with cPanel?
If you are a managed server client, that is no problem and we will work with you to ensure you can continue to use your preferred hosting control panel, but your price for your license will increase based on the number of account you have on the server.  We’ll be writing to all clients in the next 7 days to let them know personally, how much this is for them.

I want to move my server to a cPanel Alternative?
Doing this will mean your price will remain unchanged.  We will be letting all clients know the various alternatives within 7 days.  As it stands, our team are primarily trialling two different panels (both commercial panels).  Should we find one we feel will fit with what our client base typically uses, we will put it forward as our suggestion. Your website/s would need to be migrated to a new server donning this control panel, but we should be able to keep your IP the same with only a short patch of downtime at migration for the IP switch-over.  In the spirit of full transparency, we may need to charge a nominal fee to cover staff time for this data migration. Until we know what alternative we will be suggesting, and the difficulties involve in migrating to it, we cannot say clearly what this will be, but it won’t be expensive and likely in-line (perhaps cheaper) with our migrations policy

I have a Single Account Managed Server?
If you do not use email with us then we’ll be moving you to a LAMP Stack linux server within the next month to avoid the price increases.   If you do use email we will be reaching out to you within 14 days with some more information.

I have a Managed Server with many accounts?
You will be affected by this if you have more than 5 cPanel accounts so we will reach out to you in the next 14 days.  Any price increase will match exactly the difference in license cost between what we pay today vs what we will pay at change time.  If you want to explore a cPanel alternative talk to our team and we can explore a migration for you.

I am a Shared Hosting Client?
We are currently looking at how to proceed on shared hosting, much like the rest of the industry. In the short-term, nothing should change for you besides a price increase in-line with the number of accounts you have we us. If you are on a single shared hosting plan, this price increase will be modest. We plan to email all shared clients in 14 days once we handle managed server clients to lay out options available to them.

I am a Reseller Hosting / Multisite Hosting Client?
Multi-site/Reseller servers tend to be very large. Thankfully, as a company, we went away from reseller accounts that offered unlimited cPanel Accounts years ago. This means our management team are able to look at how we can normalise a pricing structure based of total accounts a Multi-site has. We will be emailing clients on Multi-site hosting in 21 days after we handle shared clients.  We hope we can keep pricing static for resellers, but if we do increase it will be also be a very modest charge to cover additional bulk charge.

If you are reading this and have any questions please do not hesitate in reaching out to us by opening a support ticket.