It’s been a couple of weeks since the initial announcement but in case you have not heard cPanel the world’s leading web hosting control panel and a company we have partnered with for many years significantly raised their pricing.  For us the cost increase is 325% for our license fees across the board.

You can read our initial blog post here.

What is our Short Term Response to these changes?

Shared Web Hosting clients will see their prices rise by 10 pence per month.  This is a very small change just to cover us for the additional ‘per account’ cost in addition to the more expensive licensing cost.

Reseller / Multi Site clients will not be affected by this and we will absorb the price increases and you will be remaining on cPanel.

Managed Server Clients have already received an email from us.  We will be passing on the cPanel License increases to these clients from 1 September.  Clients have also been given a cost neutral option to migrate to an alternative control panel where we can also swap their IP meaning no DNS updates are required.

New clients for reseller hosting will continue to be placed on cPanel servers.

New clients for shared hosting will soon be placed on Directadmin servers.

New clients for managed servers will be offered a choice of cPanel (more expensive) or Directadmin (same cost as before).  The default option will change to Directadmin within the next few days on our website.

What is our Medium Term Response to these changes?

We are seeing these changes as an opportunity to change completely our service offerings to clients and are actively working on some internal projects that will allow for web hosting to be sold to clients who do not know linux command line without relying on a third party control panel provider.  We’ll have more details in a few months.  It requires a lot of development work, a lot of testing and a lot of security testing both internally and from third party experts.  We’re two weeks into this project already and it’s pretty exciting.  It will remove our reliance on third party licensed control panel software once and for all.

These price rises are just what we needed as a Management Team to be a lot more pro active in what we do internally.  We have the skillset in house to develop our own projects but I guess the cheap licenses we were used to had stifled our creativity.  Not any more! We have a team who are determined to move forward from this experience and we look forward to taking you on the journey with us!

Finally any client who is local and wants to meet for a coffee you are more than welcome pop and see me any time.  You can also email me directly to sk@bwf.co and I’ll be happy to chat to you.  I’m usually not far from my desk so ask for me on live chat on our website if you have any specific questions you need addressed.  If I am not available then just send me an email and we can arrange a time to chat.

Stephen Kinkaid
Managing Director