Cpanel announced on 27th June 2019 a new Licensing structure that will have a great impact on hosting business. We covered that in detail in the post, Cpanel Pricing Model. Let’s learn how to deal with this change.

Cpanel licensing price increase

Cpanel’s move to change the pricing structure is likely to hit hard small business mostly hosting resellers that rely on Cpanel.  There is no doubt that the change will see hosting fees increase something which small businesses competing with large hosting companies are struggling to come to terms with.

Should you transfer the cost to customers at the risk of losing them or should you migrate to another control panel at the risk of service delivery?

Selecting the right Cpanel

The most popular control panels are Cpanel and Plesk. Therefore you have a choice between the two. This is because they dominate the market that clients are looking for. Another option is Directadmin which requires a learning curve for customers.  

What do you Gain by Migrating to Plesk from Cpanel?

• Plesk is cheaper: with $45 per month at Cpanel you can only have 100 accounts with each extra account costing $0.2 per month while with $41.24 per month at Plesk you have unlimited accounts.
• Annual Billing Method: Plesk comes with annual billing which a number of businesses prefer over monthly billing.

What do you lose by Migrating to Plesk from Cpanel?

• Loss of Data: You may lose some of your customer data during migration if you have a misconfiguration. This can have a potential effect on your business.
• Training: Your support team will have to spend hours of time trying to train customers to get used to Plesk navigation panel and configuration.
• Resistance to Change: Some customers may not want to migrate to Plesk, so you will have to lose them.
• High disk space consumption: Creates a lot of unnecessary backups

What do you gain by remaining at Cpanel with increased prices

• Load Speed: Cpanel has a faster load time compared to Plesk

• No change, therefore there is less time to spend on customer support

• No data migration budget, or risk of data loss

• No downtimes due to data migration

What do you lose by Remaining at Cpanel with increased prices

• Billing Method: With the new Cpanel licensing structure, there is no annual billing. Only monthly billing is available. The danger of monthly subscriptions or billing is that you run the risk of licensing failures due to factors like credit card expiry, lack of funds, monthly invoices e,t.c

• Increased fee which might lead to  business loss

How to adjust your Licensing fee if you chose to remain at Cpanel

If you chose to remain at Cpanel, the only option you have is to reevaluate your pricing model. If you have more than 100 accounts, you can transfer the extra $0.2 monthly charges per account to customers which translates to an addition of $2.4  annually per account. Be sure to notify your customers of the price changes and why to avoid complaints.