cPanel moves from flat to account based pricing

General Discussion
21

It looks like Siteground will be moving to ditch cPanel and move to their own product. This was posted on webhostingtalk…

Hristo from SiteGround here. … Our control panel is named Site Tools and doesn’t have an official public name yet which has probably caused the current misunderstanding.

We are coming ot shortly with a statement regarding the new control panel and the fact that we plan on not using cPanel. We decided to work in our own control panel because we believe cPanel is limiting our plans for growth in terms of tools and features. We are confident that our clients won’t miss any functility they are used to, but we’ll gain new valuable features.

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22

My current host stayed with cPanel, but has reduced the number allowed from unlimited to 10.

The new host I signed up with allowed 20, but has sent out an email saying they will be migrating all current accounts to DirectAdmin by the end of the month.

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Krystal Hosting have said they’re going to write their own replacement cPanel Pricing Changes - Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining | Blog. I can’t see that happening really. cPanel has been developed over 20 years and to write a replacement is going to take more than a few months. It would be nice if all of the main hosting companies worked together - along with a few disgruntled ex-cPanel employees - to create something. Whatever happens, this has really screwed things up for lots of people and Oakley deserve to fail.

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DreamHost has an easy-to-use panel. It has been developed over the course of 20 years. Just sayin’.

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The issue is security. Control panels have unfettered back-end access. Take note-

Patrick (RACK911) 10 Jul 2019

If anyone is considering CyberPanel, I would highly recommend not using it until further notice…

Patrick (RACK911) 11 Jul 2019

Most of the SQL queries I saw were escaped / sanitized although admittedly it was a brief once over so there probably are some lingering injections… we sent them a blunt 60 page PDF report full of exploits. #shrugs

Quite worryingly, CyberPanel is developed by Litespeed…

On the other hand, DirectAdmin (which Patrick has said repeatedly is as secure as cPanel on multiple occasions on WHT)-

DA_Mark 6 Jul 2019

As for security, I can confirm that we have hired Rack911 in the past for audits. A new one is to be conducted this coming week, actually. Credit goes to them though. They expressed concern about a new layer of security risks with the native cPanel importer feature, and we agreed it was a legitimate reason for a new audit.

So I do worry about hosts that use completely “custom” control panels and whether or not they’re properly audited. I’d be quite confident in guessing that in most cases they’re not.

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26

That’s fine if you want a US based server. Not so good if you don’t. My attempts at using a CDN with WP have never been what I’d call successful, usually causing CSS issues.

I am only interested in a reseller account too and don’t understand how that works with them.

Also, what happens if you want to leave DreamHost and migrate your sites over. Can they be imported by cPanel or DirectAdmin? Using FTP is a very slow and painful way of doing things.

I would think DreamHost would only suit a niche market. Too many unknowns for a non-geek like me.

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Well that’s kinda my point. Control panels aren’t created in 6 months. And I don’t think custom control panels are the answer anyway. How many hosting companies across the world would end up reinventing the wheel? Needs a consolidated approach IMHO and lessons must be learned from this.

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There’s always the option of staying with a cPanel host or switching to a host that uses it.

Point taken. Although…what happens when cPanel starts charging for the service? Oh wait, here we are. :wink:

That’s a double-edged sword. After all, cPanel’s consolidated approach has led to “pay up”.

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Yes, exactly - here we are, and the trend seems to be hosting companies moving to DirectAdmin.

To enable people to shop around for the best deal at any time, there needs to be consistency in the management panel. It has mostly been cPanel up until now, but it looks like it will now be DirectAdmin.

Hosting companies that have in-house panels are not going to attract the average webmaster. I have nothing against DreamHost, I just feel they are not for everyone.

cPanel has shot itself in the foot and DirectAdmin is going to be the main beneficiary.

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30

A long shot I know, but I’m meaning an open source solution developed and controlled by a consortium of hosting providers. This is instead of the current situation where the hosting providers - and practically every website owner on the planet - are being held to ransom by a bunch of tossers.

How long before DA goes the same way as cPanel & Plesk? Somebody “out there” will surely have their beady eyes on DA already - possibly even our great friends at Oa**ey (tossers). But in any event, I’m not sure that DA is up to the job. For starters, they’re going to have to grow very big, very quickly. And, if you’re feeling brave enough, have a read of this.

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Not at all my point. Patrick of RACK911 said (on WHT) that cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin, and InterWorx are all of a similar security level. We don’t know much about the security of other panels, especially whether or not they’ve been audited by an external company. Without that peace of mind, I personally wouldn’t trust a control panel that has unfettered access to the server.

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32

Liquidweb now owns Interworx

I got the following email from Liquiweb:

On June 27th, 2019 cPanel announced a significant change to their pricing structure.

A quick explanation of the situation: Currently, cPanel is licensed per server. With the new pricing structure, cPanel will license per cPanel account and per server, which results in a significant price increase, not only for us, but for our customers.

cPanel’s announcement came as a shock to us, and this dramatic change has caught the entire hosting industry by surprise. While incremental price increasesare expected from providers from time to time, this sudden and dramatic pricing increase has put businesses of all sizes in a difficult position.

The rates mentioned in the cPanel blog post are the cost for providers like Liquid Web and on average represent a 40% increase. While the cPanel 2019 pricing varies by server type, customers can expect to see a 25%-50% increase on average, and in cases where customers have >100 accounts, it could be a 100%+ price increase.

cPanel price changes for Liquid Web customers due to this vendor rate increase will be effective on January 1, 2020.

We are pleased to announce that Liquid Web now owns a competing control panel, Interworx, that will allow our customers to avoid the price increase altogether. And, because of the uncertainty that cPanel’s pricing has introduced into the control panel market, Liquid Web will be providing a price lock guarantee that ensures that the Interworx price will not increase for 3 years from January 1, 2020.

On the market for nearly 20 years, the Interworx Hosting control panel is feature-rich like cPanel and has an intuitive user interface for managing servers and for end users to oversee the operations of their websites. InterWorx has thousands of licenses in production and we expect to add thousands of additional production licenses in the upcoming months.

What happens next:

Our assumption is that most customers will want to avoid a price increase of any kind, and we will be working with you to migrate to the Interworx control panel. Migrations to InterWorx will happen over the next several months and you will be given ample notice and more details on what to expect in the upcoming weeks. We are working hard on the process and automation to reduce customer impact.

Of course, should you wish to remain on cPanel, you can certainly do so. Your current pricing on existing servers will remain unchanged until 1/1/2020 when the new cPanel pricing tiers will go into effect at Liquid Web. Should cPanel raise their pricing in future years, you should expect that Liquid Web will be forced to pass on those increases as well.

If you are a WordPress or WooCommerce user, this may be the time for you to check out Liquid Web’s Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce solutions which provide simple management dashboards allowing customers to abstract themselves from server administration altogether.

We’re pleased to be able to add Interworx for our customers while also continuing to offer cPanel as a fully-managed control panel option, including the same level of full server support by the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting®

We’ll continue to keep you posted on this topic via our ticketing system and our blog. Stay tuned!

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33

I’ve now received my notification of the price increase for my Reseller account (since it’s time to renew). From the looks of that audit thread, there are a lot of flaws in the other panel software, although they are fixing them, so maybe they are worth using now.
I just looked at LiquidWeb since their promotion sounded good, but they cost almost 3 times what my increased price is.
Maybe it’s time to move my few clients to their own accounts and say goodbye.

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@joyously You could take a look at the Reseller pricing I charge at Agreed Hosting.