Good Morning
I trust everyone is doing well and I wanted to reach out to you about cPanel and yet another rise in their pricing. Many of our clients will have noticed we (along with other hosts) have increased pricing since June 2019 and the majority of the price rises has been caused by cPanel raising their pricing. cPanel were sold to a Venture Capitalist company in 2019 by their founder and have raised prices three times since then:
Link to January 2022 announcement: https://cpanel.net/wp-content/themes/cPbase/assets/docs/cp_store_licensing_guide_2021_Update.pdf
Retail Pricing from January 2022
Our Single Account Servers are the ideal solution to host a single website. They have dedicated resources, managed backups and come fully managed with 24/7 support with live chat answered in seconds. It's no longer sustainable for us to offer these servers at the same cost using cPanel. You may have noticed we have increased the cost of these servers by £1 per month and will need to further increase in January 2022 when the price rises come in. Some clients are on legacy pricing for these servers and we will need to remove that from January 2022 as well I'm afraid.
Moving to an Alternative Panel (avoid price increases!)
Starting today through January when the prices increase again we are working hard to move all Single Account Servers to the Direct Admin Control Panel. Direct Admin has come a long way since we first used it in 2019 and is now a true alternative to cPanel. They have implemented http/2 as standard as well as now having single sign on for PHP MyAdmin for database management. We have tweaked our template to forward /cpanel and /webmail links to the Direct Admin alternative and where possible passwords will copy across so it should be a seamless experience. Our staff are being fully trained in the use of this panel and we have our Spam Experts Email Filtering Scripts now fully compatible with the software. Softaculous Script Installer is available (license charge) and Imunify Anti Virus and Imunify Anti Virus + (license charge) now have a GUI version for Direct Admin (something that was lacking back in 2019) so you can manage your own Virus scanning as standard and automated malware removal if you upgrade.
By their nature hosting just one account it's rare clients log into the Control Panel on a regular basis for Single Account Servers so taking the decision to move all our Single Account Server clients to Direct Admin Control Panel will be a relatively painless experience. It will also shield you from the annual 10% price rises from cPanel that seems to be the policy now. Our team are on hand to help if you need it and in the unlikely event you want to move back to cPanel we can of course do that and just charge the additional license fees.
Please reply to the email we send you if you prefer not to move or want to talk some more.
I want to stay with cPanel
We suspect most single account server clients are happy to move as logging into a control panel is something you do on a very infrequent basis. However if you prefer to stay with cPanel just let us know and we will simply increase your costs in January when the license increases.
Who are Direct Admin
They are a Canadian Company with a small but dedicated team and we've been excited by what they have done to their product since we first used it in June 2019. It's grown up significantly since then and they are a really awesome bunch of folk from all the communications and discussions we have had from them. They deserve to do well and we are proud to be partnered with them.
I want to chat with you?
No problem at all just come on live chat or open a support ticket. If you are local to our offices why not pop in for a coffee or if you are in Northern Ireland or Republic of Ireland book in for a 'Coffee with your Webhost' meet as we will be travelling the country in October to chat to our wonderful clients (and future clients!). If you are from England, Scotland and Wales we'll be coming to see you soon for 'Coffee with your Webhost' so if you want us to come to your town send us a message.
Kind Regards
Stephen Kinkaid (Managing Director)
