cPanel Price Increase And Alternative Control Panels

Posted on July 5th, 2019

Update: 2021 Price increase

On July 2nd, 2019 cPanel announced a massive pricing increase that will apply to all partners. They are claiming that pricing has not changed in 20 years and that a price increase is long overdue. It saddens us how disconnected Oakley Capitol (the new owners of cPanel, Plesk, and WHMCS) is from the ever-changing landscape of the hosting industry. They are correct with today’s hardware web hosts are able to allocate more accounts per server. What they fail to understand is 20 years ago we charged $20 per month for a shared web hosting package, today we charge $5. Many of our competitors and even our own customers charge a lot less.

The hosting industry is very competitive. Unfortunately, there has not been enough competition for control panels such as cPanel or Plesk in order to keep them in line. With the switch to virtualization products such as VPS, cPanel should have a windfall of additional revenue and customers coming in. Unfortunately they never changed with the times. They never focused on a cloud-based software package, in addition, they never caught onto the WordPress movement and let hosting companies with internally developed control panels with customized features for WordPress that include staging and live environments gain momentum. These tools alone outpace cPanel-focused providers such as InterServer.

It’s a shame that cPanel a company we heavily relied upon, has failed in so many ways and now in order to offset declining revenue they are proposing a price structure that will result in upwards of an 800% increase for some of our customers. It’s hard to process how that decision can be deemed a strategic business move.

New cPanel Prices

Package Name: Admin
Max Accounts: 5
VPS/Cloud Only
$22.00 per month

Package Name: Pro
Max Accounts: 30
VPS/Cloud Only
$32.00 per month

Package Name: Plus
Max Accounts: 50
VPS/Cloud Only
$39.00 per month

Package Name: Premier
Max Accounts: 100
VPS/Cloud/Metal/Dedicated
$48.00 per month
Cost per account over 100: $.28

External License prices have not been set but we are considering matching the prices listed inside the cPanel Store.

The price increase is scheduled for January 1st, 2020.

If you are displeased with the proposed price increase, we can help seek alternative control panels that are comparable to cPanel

As you may already know, cPanel is the industry’s leading web hosting control panel, however, it isn’t a free one. cPanel provides a seamless user interface to administer a server or several sites, along with many other automation tools. They continuously are developing new tools that are based upon customer’s requests, all in an effort to achieve overall customer satisfaction on their quest to remain at the top of hosting control panels. Therefore cPanel should be the go-to control panel for hosting companies in a shared hosting environment being that it is easy to integrate with billing systems like WHMCS or Host Billing to automate the service setups.  On the flip side, a major drawback to cPanel is that it can only be installed on either CentOS or RHEL based Operating Systems.

Below we have outlined a list of a few paid and free cPanel alternative control panels, that you can use to run your hosting business or to host your own sites.

 1) Plesk Control Panel:

This is an alternative hosting control panel for cPanel, although owned by the same company. This is the second most used control panel in the hosting industry and can be integrated with billing systems like WHMCS. Another added advantage for Plesk is that it is versatile in both Linux and Windows Operating systems and can be used in different Linux flavors like CentOS, Ubuntu, etc. Plesk requires a license which comes with an associated cost. Plesk Licenses can be purchased from inside our control panel.

Alternative control panels

2) DirectAdmin:

The DirectAdmin control panel provides three levels of access: Admin, user, and reseller. While DirectAdmin may not have the abundance of features that we have come to expect from cPanel, it does provide an equally satisfying user experience and is definitely worth trying it out. InterServer provides a license for DirectAdmin, that you can purchase via the InterServer client portal. For a full list of its features, please visit their website here – https://www.directadmin.com/features_list.php

To install the DirectAdmin control panel on your server, visit our tips article here – https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/directadmin-installation/

Alternative control panels

3) Webuzo/BreadBasket:

The Webuzo panel would be an alternative for cPanel, however, it only provides a single user level access. Only the administrator will have access to the control panel and can install a variety of  240 applications with a single click. This control panel is from the same developers of Softaculous, and for more information about this panel, please check our tips article here – https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/everything-webuzo-control-panel/

At InterServer, we offer a premium version of the Webuzo control panel FREE of cost which you can be utilized to deploy either of our VPS/Dedicated servers. To install the Webuzo control panel, you can either choose our Webuzo template while re-installing the OS or to manually proceed, refer our tips article here – https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/installing-webuzo-on-a-clean-centos7-install/

We also have written a cPanel to Webuzo migration tutorial.

Alternative control panels

4) InterWorx:

InterWorx is a less known control panel however would still be a viable alternative to cPanel, it provides an similar list of features that comparable to cPanel but again there are differences especially when it comes to the UI.  This is also a paid product, which requires a license that can be purchased from their website at https://www.interworx.com/buy-now/

It has two levels of access, one as Administrator named Nodeworx and another for the site/user level access named Siteworx.

Alternative control panels

5) CentOS Web Panel:

CentOS Web Panel would be a solid choice for a free alternative to cPanel with almost all of the same features on hand it can be integrated easily with Cloud Linux and LiteSpeed for better security and performance. It also provides Nginx- Apache reverse proxy and even provides a complex proxy set up with Nginx-Apache-Varnish for enhanced performance. CWP also has the administrator and site level user access and looks similar to the cPanel interface. We have a cPanel to CentOS Web Panel migration tutorial available.

Alternative control panels

We hope that this article provides you with a variety of sustainable options that are comparable to cPanel, and for those who are on budget it’s important to know that you have options.

If you require any additional information or wish to compare any other panels, please get in touch with our support team via [email protected]

 

16 Responses to “cPanel Price Increase And Alternative Control Panels”

  1. Richard Ward says:

    Plesk is owned by the same company as cPanel. If you think flocking to Plesk is an option, be prepared next year when all the cPanel migrants are on Plesk and Oakley does another pricing switch for their “unlimited” license.

    Remember when Modernbill price increased (now WHMCS)? Or what about the takeover of Kayako? All of these once industry standards are going away in favor of smaller players (DirectAdmin, Clientexec) and in-house control panels.

  2. Jorge says:

    It is urgent Shared Hosting accounts with DirectAdmin, we no longer want cPanel.

  3. Olajire says:

    We don’t want cPanel anymore, no matter at what price, it is bye to cPanel forever and definitely Plesk is cPanel in disguise, no way too! Anything else but cPanel and Plesk

  4. Lobo says:

    Playing around with CentOS Web Panel and got very satisfied, easy set up and is compatible with cPanel site backups, all my testing has been a breezy so I’m leaving cPanel for good, I wouldn’t ever accept an arbitrary increase in pricing out of the blue no matter how “dominant” these guys think they are.

  5. Jason says:

    Its ashamed they are switching to this new price module. I understand the need of a price increase since it has been 20 years since there was one. The one thing they f’ed up on was making it per user module instead of a per server module like it was. They could have simply kept it at unlimited cPanel’s per a server and just charge more for each licensed server. This would have been allot better compromise and with the number of licenses out there the new company could have made more going this route instead of f’ing the customers over. But no they want to rack in as much money as possible before losing a massive percentage of their customer base. The way I see it is this insane 800% increase is to recover the cost Oakley Capitol put up to buy cPanel.

  6. zealwebtech says:

    Hello to all,
    What about Kloxo and Hepsia.

    also wanted to know if interserver Team will help us in migration.
    We are not expert in these control panels.
    Cpanel management have to understand that such price hike is not good for the market monopoly.
    Or may be interserver can create their own control panel is the same cost as cpanel charging with us right now.
    We will love to pay the same to interserver.

    • Michael Lavrik says:

      There are many control panels out there such as Kloxo, Hepsia, Interworx and many more. But we are only recommending the ones our support department is familiar with.
      Yes, we can provide free migration to another control panel we support.

  7. Chris says:

    I’ve been on InterWorx for 7 years. Was my platform of choice after Parallels acquired hsphere.

  8. Faisal H. says:

    Greedy cPanel just done a “golden egg” mistake.

    cPanel decline started. Now thousands of small hosting providers will find alternatives like CentOS web panel (lottery time for them) and when these “thousands of small hosting providers” will gone then cPanel will again increase prices to fulfill its greed and expense from big fishes and cPanel story will end like “shawshank redemption” 🙂

    cPanel – the Blackmailer of the Internet ERA.

  9. Gary Stephens says:

    Some of the links in this article are broken and outdated. You really should update.

  10. Michael Wallace says:

    I come late to this conversation. I had to move from shared to vps recently, and the new cPanel pricing tiers were staring me in the face. I had just over 5 clients, so had to go with the $25 tier. That pushed me to find inexpensive unmanaged vps hosting for personal testing of web panel software.

    I found Interserver, and the DA panel lic is a good deal. I might have gone with free, but I’m new to managing my own site software. So I choose DA since it is has employees maintaining the product. I did try other paid products. But because of pricing, product quality, support and company presence, I thought DA was overall the best bang for the buck.

    Don’t think I’ll ever go back to cPanel. Glad I learned Plesk was part of their family, so will avoid them too.

    Thankful I found Interserver since they have a nifty client interface for vps managment.

  11. Sinan says:

    I agree with everything you said with cpanel and I appreciate the alternative panels you mentioned here.

    But I also have to criticize interserver in this subject: I decided to go with “CentOS Web Panel” and converted one of my server to CWP last year and converting my other server to CWP this month. So I got rid of cpanel for good but now I lost interserver’s “support”.

    Your staff did not help me migrating to centos web panel (although its suggested by you in this blog here) so I hired external help for migration. That is ok, but your staff are not helping with anything server related now since its “not cpanel” anymore. They say “your server management” includes supported web panels only! Well if you support cpanel only, you are forcing us to use cpanel only. We are happy to leave them but IMO you should also help us leave them.

    Getting rid of cpanel saved me cpanel license cost but now I’m paying same by hiring centos web panel professionals to solve server related problems. My 17 years old “managed servers” in interserver now became “unmanaged”.

Leave a Reply