cPanel Price Increase And Alternative Control Panels

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

The hosting industry is extremely competitive. Unfortunately, there has not been enough competition for control panels like cPanel or Plesk to keep them in line. With the shift to virtualization products like VPS, cPanel should have seen a surge in additional revenue and customers. Unfortunately, they never adapted to the changing times. They never focused on a cloud-based software package, nor did they embrace the WordPress movement and let hosting companies with internally developed control panels and customized WordPress features such as staging and live environments gain momentum. These tools alone surpass cPanel-focused providers like WebHostingPeople.

It is a shame that cPanel, a company we heavily relied on, has failed in so many ways and now, in an effort to offset declining revenue, they are proposing a price structure that could result in an increase of up to 800% for some of our customers. It is difficult to comprehend how that decision can be viewed as a strategic business move.

Current cPanel Prices

Package Name: Admin
Max Accounts: 5
VPS/Cloud Only
$14.50 per month

Package Name: Professional
Max Accounts: 30
VPS/Cloud Only
$19.50 per month

Package Name: Plus
Max Accounts: 50
VPS/Cloud Only
$27.00 per month

Package Name: Premier
Max Accounts: 100
VPS/Cloud/Metal/Dedicated
$34.00 per month
Price per account over 100: $0.15

External license costs have not been set, but we are considering matching the prices listed within the cPanel Store.

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

If you are displeased with the proposed price increase, we can help you find alternative control panels that are similar to cPanel.

As you may already know, cPanel is the industry’s leading hosting control panel, but it is not free. cPanel provides a seamless user interface to manage a server or multiple websites, along with many other automation tools. They consistently develop new tools based on customer requests to ensure overall customer satisfaction and 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 as it is easy to integrate with billing systems like WHMCS or Host Billing for service automation. On the flip side, a major drawback of cPanel is that it can only be installed on CentOS or RHEL based operating systems.

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

1) Plesk Control Panel:

This is an alternative hosting control panel to 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 advantage of Plesk is its flexibility in both Linux and Windows operating systems and can be used in various Linux flavors like CentOS, Ubuntu, etc. Plesk requires a license which comes with associated costs. Plesk licenses can be purchased from within our control panel.

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 out. WebHostingPeople offers a license for DirectAdmin, which you can purchase through the WebHostingPeople client portal. For a full list of its features, please visit their website here.

3) Webuzo/BreadBasket:

The Webuzo panel is also an alternative for cPanel, however, it only provides 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 as Softaculous, and for more information about this panel, please check our recommendations article here.

At WebHostingPeople, we offer a premium version of the Webuzo control panel FREE of cost, which you can use to deploy either our VPS or Dedicated servers. To install the Webuzo control panel, you can either choose our Webuzo template while re-installing the OS, or proceed manually by referring to our recommendations article here.

We also have a cPanel to Webuzo migration tutorial.

4) InterWorx:

InterWorx is a lesser-known control panel but would still be a viable alternative to cPanel. It provides a comparable list of features to cPanel but with differences, particularly in terms of the user interface. This is also a paid product that requires a license, which can be purchased from their website here.

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

5) CentOS Web Panel:

CentOS Web Panel is also a solid choice as a free alternative to cPanel, offering almost all the same features at hand. It can easily integrate with Cloud Linux and LiteSpeed for better security and performance. It also provides Nginx-Apache reverse proxy and even offers a sophisticated proxy setup with Nginx-Apache-Varnish for enhanced performance. CWP also has administrator and site-level user access and resembles the cPanel interface. We have a cPanel to CentOS Web Panel migration tutorial available.

We hope that this article provides you with a variety of sustainable options that are similar to cPanel, and for those on a budget, it is important to know that you have choices.

If you require any more information or would like to compare other panels, please get in touch with our support team.