cPanel price rises will keep coming
cPanel costs are an ever-growing part of web hosting bills all around the world.
This article is from December 2021. For more recent news about cPanel pricing, see A fifth consecutive year of cPanel price rises (October 2023) or New Year, New cPanel Prices (November 2022).
Most MyHost customers are cPanel users. cPanel is where you manage your domains, email accounts, databases, software packages and more. It's a handy software package that we, like a lot of hosting providers, license from a company that's also called cPanel. If you have a hosting pakage with us, part of the price covers your cPanel license. This article is about the cost of that licensing and, frankly, it's not good news.
Creating new email accounts is one of many things that cPanel makes easy
When cPanel costs go up every hosting package that we offer (that's web, email, and reseller hosting) is affected. And these days, those prices rises just keep on coming. All around the world, hosting providers like us are dealing with the consequences.
cPanel prices since 2020: The only way is up
Back in the good old days - like, 2019 - US$200/year covered cPanel for a whole VPS, or US$425/year for a Dedicated Server, no matter how many web hosting accounts sat on the server in question. Our shared hosting servers let us split the cost of cPanel between a lot of customers, which made it almost negligible.
This simple, cheap system ended when monthly per-account pricing was introduced by cPanel that year. That meant no more annual discounts and no more cost-sharing between customers. Some web hosting companies disclosed a 10x increase in cPanel costs per customer, overnight. And that was only the start.
Our reaction in 2019: "cPanel might have concerned some of their customers, they might even lose a few, yet they remain one of the most dependable and popular web hosting platforms in the industry.
Since then, price rises have become routine. They were bumped up last January and have been signalled for the start of 2022 as well. The latest announcement included this rather bleak line: "We currently evaluate our license pricing on an annual basis."
But our analysis from 2019 still holds. cPanel is familiar, reliable, and still worth paying for. As long as this is true it's reasonable to expect that they'll add another 10% or so to their prices each year.
So as cPanel has ratcheted up prices, we've been forced to follow. Here's how the last few years have gone:
| Account limit | 5 | 30 | 100 | Per account 100+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 2019 | $30 | $30 | $30 | 00c |
| 2020 | $35 | $50 | $80 | .35c |
| 2021 | $40 | $55 | $90 | .65c |
| 2022 | $45 | $60 | $100 | .75c |
| Change since 2019 | +50% | +100% | +233% | +114% (since 2020) |
cPanel isn't exactly replaceable
As a way to mange domains and hosting, there's a lot to like about cPanel. There's no other system that does as much and is as familiar to users. It's reasonably easy for our customers to get to grips with using cPanel and because it's popular there's a lot of helpful information out there when you get stuck.
In short, there's no ready replacement for cPanel waiting in the wings. There's a reason why it's the industry standard.
Like a lot of hosting providers around the world, we are watching an important supplier test its own market power. As long as the prices that we charge to our customers stay affordable and competitive, there's only so much that we can do.
What this means for you, and for us
cPanel costs are going to be a bigger and bigger slice of the overall cost of web hosting. This will be a global trend. We're working hard to reduce other costs without affecting the quality of the hosting you get.
Two examples of that:
- We've changed the way we process credit card payments to reduce the fees we get charged.
- When we launched a bigger, better MyHost last year we changed how our multi-site hosting packages work. Rather than bundle multiple cPanel accounts together we use an "add-on domain" model. This lets you host multiple sites within a single cPanel account and pay for only one cPanel license (for now, but we can't guarantee that cPanel won't tweak their pricing again).
Let us be really clear here: We don't want to make hosting with us any less convenient, or more expensive.
If you're running a single cPanel
The best advice for web hosting customers with a single cPanel is to sit tight. Even after big percentage rises, the monthly cost of cPanel is still cents rather than dollars. We're keeping a close eye on every cost that your package carries and doing our best to keep them low.
If you're dealing with a lot of cPanels
On the other hand if you're paying for a lot of cPanel licenses - perhaps you're a reseller, or an agency - there might be a way to trim your bill without much disruption.
Options here get a bit complicated, and every case is different, so the best way to start is with a talk in person. Just contact us and we'll be happy to work thorugh your options.
It's not fun to watch any costs go up the way cPanel licenses are, but we want to be upfront about what's going on. We also want you to keep enjoying affordable, world-class hosting. If you have any questions about our web hosting packages, or comments about how we're going, get in touch today.