Hello,
On June 27th, 2019 cPanel
announced a significant change to their pricing structure.
A quick explanation of the situation: Currently, cPanel is licensed per server. With the new pricing structure, cPanel will license per cPanel account and per server, which results in a significant price increase, not only for us, but for our customers.
cPanel’s announcement came as a shock to us, and this dramatic change has caught the entire hosting industry by surprise. While incremental price increases are expected from providers from time to time, this sudden and dramatic pricing increase has put businesses of all sizes in a difficult position.
The rates mentioned in the cPanel blog post are the cost for providers like Liquid Web and on average represent a 40% increase. While the cPanel 2019 pricing varies by server type, customers can expect to see a 25%-50% increase on average, and in cases where customers have >100 accounts, it could be a 100%+ price increase.
cPanel price changes for Liquid Web customers due to this vendor rate increase will be effective on January 1, 2020.
We are pleased to announce that Liquid Web now owns a competing control panel,
Interworx, that will allow our customers to avoid the price increase altogether. And, because of the uncertainty that cPanel’s pricing has introduced into the control panel market, Liquid Web will be providing a price lock guarantee that ensures that the Interworx price will not increase for 3 years from January 1, 2020.
On the market for nearly 20 years, the Interworx Hosting control panel is feature-rich like cPanel and has an intuitive user interface for managing servers and for end users to oversee the operations of their websites. InterWorx has thousands of licenses in production and we expect to add thousands of additional production licenses in the upcoming months.
What happens next:
Our assumption is that most customers will want to avoid a price increase of any kind, and we will be working with you to migrate to the Interworx control panel. Migrations to InterWorx will happen over the next several months and you will be given ample notice and more details on what to expect in the upcoming weeks. We are working hard on the process and automation to reduce customer impact.
Of course, should you wish to remain on cPanel, you can certainly do so. Your current pricing on existing servers will remain unchanged until 1/1/2020 when the new
cPanel pricing tiers will go into effect at Liquid Web. Should cPanel raise their pricing in future years, you should expect that Liquid Web will be forced to pass on those increases as well.
If you are a WordPress or WooCommerce user, this may be the time for you to check out Liquid Web’s Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce solutions which provide simple management dashboards allowing customers to abstract themselves from server administration altogether.
We’re pleased to be able to add Interworx for our customers while also continuing to offer cPanel as a fully-managed control panel option, including the same level of full server support by the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting®