Worried about cPanel Price Hike? We’ve evaluated cPanel Alternatives just for you, read on!
If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people. – Chinese Proverb
Yes, that’s what cPanel has done over the years in their business strategies.
The online Linux-based web hosting control panel provider empowers site owners in streamlining the web hosting processes. cPanel, which is arguably the most used Linux-based web hosting control panel capturing close to 30% of global market share and 70% US market share, has recently uplifted its pricing in late Jun 2019, and this wobbled up the entire hosting community.
Why cPanel raised its pricing?
cPanel announced its all-new account-based pricing and license structure for its partners, distributors, and store customers. The price hike is done after long 20 years claims cPanel, and that is nothing less than a massive disappointment to the entire hosting fraternity. According to cPanels official blog the rise in prices are for the sake of constant innovation in hardware advancement, software, and optimizations of overall resources including additions of more brainpower which in turn make them more confident to continue their investments in product developments, upscale their security measures and grow with the growing web-hosting ecosystem.
While all these seem legit, the main reason for price hike is the acquisition of cPanel by a venture capitalist group – Oakley Capital. The business’s current portfolio includes Plesk, WHMCS, and many other web hosting companies under his umbrella. Subsequently, to an extent, they can snatch complete control of web hosting marketing share for control panel business after cPanel’s acquisition.
cPanel’s Old Pricing Structure:
cPanel’s New Pricing Structure:
The pricing above represents the cPanel prices in 2019 for providers like Hivelocity,LiquidWeb, LeaseWeb, RedSwitches, and others. On average that comes up to a 40% increase for these providers in their existing cPanel license cost and customers, it could be somewhere near about 25-50% increment in their current price, and if they hold 100+ accounts, it could surpass more than 100% increase mark easily.
Customer Sentiments on Overpowering cPanel Pricing
News of the cPanel acquisition by Oakley has given subtle hints to the hosting providers about the rise in prices of cPanel license but such a huge alteration in prices came as a shocker to the entire community. Here’s how the sentiments after cPanel price hikes went on burning on Twitter –
@cPanel Congratulations!! your price hike has now killed more than 100s of small hard-working web service providers across the globe…!!— JustMeRiya (@pixellet) November 12, 2019Due to the significant price hike (300%+) announced by @cPanel we will be moving all our web hosting customers to DirectAdmin and discontinuing any support for cPanel
— 5wire.co.uk (@5wireHosting) August 2, 2019
And then to hold fire, cPanel apologized and introduced Update to Account-Based Pricing. While some of them expressed their frustration on social media, here’s how people reacted about this pricing on cPanel’s official blog post on New Account-based pricing –
Considering this fluctuation in cPanel prices in late Jun 2019, LiquidWeb is now encouraging their existing customers to switched to their competing control panel Interworx and promised its pricing won’t be going to change for at least 3 years from now.
Another hosting provider, who switched its entire VPS/Cloud and dedicated cloud infrastructure to DirectAdmin is UnderHost.com, You can feel the rage already in their tweet about cPanel’s new pricing strategy –
5 Best cPanel Alternatives
cPanel pricing announcement has unearthed the entire hosting community? While you have seen LiquidWeb and UnderHost totally boycotting cPanel and encouraging InterWorx and DirectAdmin as alternatives to cPanel, we certainly know that the same amount of dissatisfaction has made you come this far to find out our picks of best cPanel alternative in 2019. And they’re –
- Froxlor
- Zpanel
- WebMin
- DirectAdmin
- CentOS Web Panel
Note: We haven’t included Plesk in our best pick of cPanel alternative for this year is the fact that it belongs to the same company – Oakley Capital.
Let’s deep dive more and understand these cPanel Alternatives in depth.
Froxlor
Froxlor is a server management panel that claims to be the lightweight server management software that fulfills your application hosting needs in and out. It is an open-source panel developed and supported by an experienced developer community around the world. In the US, it is the most popular alternative to cPanel. It offers a clear and concise user interface and covers almost every feature that you would expect a web hosting panel to have.
Features:
- Customizable UI
- Easy PHP configurations
- Full control over hosting through API
- MySQL Management
- Free certificates from Let’s Encrypt directly
Pros:
- Simple UI & Navigation
- Exceptional Customer Support
- It’s Open- Source and Free
ZPanel
ZPanel is a complete website hosting control panel developed in PHP and several other open-source software, and it aims to provide secure and convenient web hosting systems to its end users. Since it has been designed using open-source software and written in PHP, which itself is an open-source programming language, ZPanel is free to download!
Features:
- Works seamlessly with Windows OS, Linux, Unix, and even MacOSX
- Free cPanel lookalike themes available
- Free community support
- manage MySQL databases, email mailboxes, forwarders, and distribution lists
Pros:
- Free to download
- Easy to use and manage
- Priority support on as min as $10
WebMin
WebMin is favored for Linux machines, Webmin is a web-based control panel powered by Perl based application and allows you to manage multiple computers through a single interface. It simplifies your Linux management in a few clicks. It also supports a variety of plugins and supported applications, WebMin offers a user-friendly interface for easy administration.
Features:
- Set up the quota for disk space allocation to users
- Create and configure VS on apache
- Database management, support for MySQL, PostgreSQL servers
Pros:
- Free to download
- Easy User administration
- Easy upgrade options
DirectAdmin
DirectAdmin is one of the prominent competitors and alternatives to cPanel, this Linux-based control panel is lightweight and consists of all the essential features that you might find in cPanel. Just like cPanel supports Nginx, Litespeed, and database servers like MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, which is why cPanel has gained the market.
Dedicated server management becomes pretty much comfortable with DirectAdmin as it provides almost every administrative option to access your hosting.
DirectAdmin licenses start with $29/month making it the first choice of every hosting company looking for budget cPanel alternatives to retain their existing customers churning due to cPanel’s brutal price hikes in June 2019.
Features:
- Integrated Ticket Support
- Fully customizable UI
- One-click live updates
- Automatic recovery
Pros:
- Easily accessible and available documentation on the internet
- Email Support and Community help
- Webmail and security plugins
- 30-days free trial
CentOS Web Panel
CentOS is a free and open-source web-based control panel that enables fast and easy management of your VPS or dedicated server environment. CentOS run smooth with various Linux-based OS and 3rd party application like LiteSpeed, CloudLinux, Softaculous and provide automatic installation of LAMP servers.
Features:
- Varnish cache server support
- Mod Security & OWASP rules
- DNS Zone management
- Easy cPanel Migration
Pros:
- Regular updates by CWP developers
- Free to use and open-source
- Free Auto SSL
- One-Click Rebuild Postfix for emails
Conclusion
While the majority of hosting fraternity and small businesses are feeling despaired after this cPanel price hike, in our opinion, we would like to tell that if you’re looking for web hosting that’s reliable, high-end, user-friendly, and full of features, having cPanel’s back is not a wrong move. We believe everything comes at a cost, and nothing comes for free. So to get the unmatched level of security, data privacy, and tech support for your hosting management needs, cPanel is the best.
While on the other hand, if you’re a business that gets a massive impact on their business expenditure, we have already covered multiple free cPanel alternatives that will help you get the most of your hosting management done at the optimum levels.
And if both the options don’t ring a bell to you, then we have some attractive cPanel dedicated server offers that can get you up to 1000 cPanel accounts combined with powerful Intel Xeon dual-core processors in as minimum as € 90/month.
Want to know more about cPanel hosting plans? Contact us or email us at [email protected]
