cPanel Price Increase - What's next?

On Jun 27th, 2019 cPanel announced “Account Based Pricing” (Price Increase)

The web hosting industry was very upset by this announcement as to be expected.

After the dust settled, I feel like most providers are still using cPanel.

Sure, maybe they lost a small percentage of customers, but the price increase should more than cover whatever the lost in sales they experienced as a result of the price increase.

Very interested to see what others think. Will more providers move to DirectAdmin in the future?

I think the distrust in cPanel/Oakley is such that providers that haven’t already migrated away from cPanel to DA or something else are investigating alternative options. Even if some providers didn’t get hit hard by the price increase, the seed has been planted that they might do something like this again with cPanel or try to milk some of their other products more (Plesk, WHMCS, etc).

Ever since the announcement, though, I’ve noticed everyone and their mother offering free DA licenses with their products, so it’s only a matter of time before DA gains the majority of the shared hosting market.

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I agree with you, however since cPanel has been dominant now for years, will customers be willing to make the switch? I feel like of providers haven’t made the change because their customers expect cPanel.

Of course, there will be aversion to change – that’s human nature after all. But DA has already made significant improvements in a short period of time, including making the user interface more intuitive and more akin to cPanel’s.

If providers can somehow keep costs low and still offer cPanel at a competitive rate, then certainly it will stick around for awhile. But because of all of the extremely cheap DA-powered offers and users wanting unlimited accounts, there will be a slow and steady migration to providers that use DA due to pricing alone.

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Suddenly you know it…

It’s time for BallsPanel.

Coded by Balls, Made for Balls.

Ball-Panel

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DirectAdmin forums are now more fun than WHT ever was

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I still pay for cPanel because the pricing is the same for the number of accounts I have.

Sure I hate cPanel, but I think is the best panel compared to other options.

If DirectAdmin had offered a discount this BlackFriday, another would be the situation.

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I’m personally loving using APNSCP in a professional hosting environment :stuck_out_tongue:

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I find this quite interesting - maybe some providers who have switched can jump in and give some actual feelings for how prevalent this is/was with their clients.

I think that people who are either providers or - like me - interested in the hosting industry from a hobbyist point of view - vastly overestimate the time clients spend in a control panel.

I think the change from cPanels X3 skin to Paper Lantern was probably as dramatic as the change from cPanel to DA would be for a lot of clients.

I think the real pain is actually that providers have to manage a new panel that isn’t cPanel when they have years/decades of experience with it. To some degree it’s like switching from Windows to Mac - both have strengths and weaknesses and both can do 95% of what the other can, but you already know how to achieve something on Windows and it can be frustrating to figure it out when you move to Mac.

Lifetime license only $159

Eat that, cPanel.

Or if you were early, free :wink:

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:open_mouth:

Goes up to $299 December 15 when monthlies land, but monthlies are a mere $15/month and integrate 1-clicks, firewall, outbound milter, and resource containment. APNSCP is available on DigitalOcean’s Marketplace and eats cPanel and Plesk’s lunch:

Machine IPs: 64.225.38.212, 64.225.38.207, 64.225.38.224, all deployed in SFO2. 2 GB RAM, 50 GB storage standard Droplet.

Baseline w/ 1 site:
APNSCP : 806 MB free. If we enable low memory, which will introduce a slight delay in processing panel jobs as well as disable SNI for Dovecot/Postfix, memory increases by 99 MB to 905 MB free.
cPanel : 1025 MB free.
Plesk : 819 MB free… then it slowly began gobbling memory - 763 MB

cPanel is the clear winner here helping you save a whopping stick of RAM in 1996 terms.

Let’s talk WordPress performance, where the real concerns come into play.

ab -n 1000 -c 1 http://test-domain.com/ , we’re taxing the CPU without much consideration for SSL overhead.

APNSCP : 36.90 requests per second (0 failures), 27.10 ms per req
cPanel : 2.95 requests per second (0 failures), 339.26 ms per req ( default settings )
cPanel w/ OPcache + PHP-FPM: 28.27 requests per second (0 failures), 35.37 ms per req
Plesk : 13.57 requests per second (0 failures), 73.71 ms per req (yes OPcache is enabled)

APNSCP trades memory for performance. If your CPU is pegged there’s little that you can throw its way to ameliorate the situation. If you’re constrained by memory, just resize the VM. If 256 MB is impossible to append onto your machine, I’d recommend stepping back in the TARDIS and returning to the present.

Performance is cumulative. Shave a little off here and there and holistically you have a platform that hauls balls.

PS: Blesta module is in the works too.

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@nem

Have you considered teaming up with @eva2000 / George Liu / CentminMod ?

I am a fan of his work, but no we haven’t cross paths yet nor have I had much of a TA from him :frowning:

Played around with the panel on a test VM for a couple of months back when you were giving out free lifetime licenses. I snagged one and intend to use it in production on a dedi by the end of the year.

If things pan out, I certainly wouldn’t mind paying for my next lifetime license at the revised price just to support active development.

Keep up the good work @nem!

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Be sure to virtualize that machine if it’s a heavyweight dedi. APNSCP features a built-in automated system recovery that’ll pop the escape hatch if run-queue sizes explode beyond reconcilable numbers (> 25 per CPU is default, watchdog_threshold in apnscp-vars.yml). Virtualizing maybe is a 3-5% performance hit, but an ASR brings the system back into normal operating parameters in under 30 seconds.

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Thanks for the tip. Will keep that in mind :slight_smile:

As for the dedi, its sufficiently powered for the task at hand - Xeon E3-1240v6 with 32GB RAM and a couple of NVMe SSDs. I always set up proxmox and virtualize as it makes it rather easy to take snapshots or migrate VMs when needed.

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Yeah, I still keep beating myself after not jumping on that deal, or the BF one for that matter. :confused:

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