cPanel Price Increase: Why Web Hosting Prices Will Go Up in Kenya.

cPanel is one of the most popular control panels for Kenyan web hosting companies. It lets you conveniently manage all services in a single place. Currently, cPanel is the industry standard and most web developers are well acquainted with it.

cPanel has shaken the web hosting community with its recent price rise announcement. They have changed its pricing model from a per server pricing to a per account model.

So if a web hosting company was paying $11 (Kshs 1,100) per cPanel license for each server and running 1,000 websites, they will now have to pay $122 (Kshs 12200). That’s approximately 1000% price rise! And we know who the costs will be transferred to. The end user who will be purchasing web hosting for his/her new website.

According to cPanel’s new pricing, here’s the breakup for 1000 websites :

  1. $32 for 100 accounts
  2. $0.1 each for 900 accounts

The “Not So Acceptable” New Pricing

The pricing is different depending upon the number of accounts.

General Pricing

  • For 5 accounts – $20/month
  • For 30 accounts – $30/month
  • For 100 accounts – $45/month + $0.20 for each additional account

You can find more information about the latest pricing here.

cPanel Pricing: New vs Old

People are criticizing cPanel for rolling out the new pricing model. Let’s see the old and new pricing of cPanel:

  • cPanel Pricing Earlier

Before it was simply VPS and dedicated pricing.

  • Latest cPanel Pricing

The new pricing will not make a huge difference to people under 5 Accounts. However, as the accounts increase, cPanel will cost more than the server itself.

Major Impact on Web Hosting Community

Clearly, the web hosting community will be hit hard.

Before we continue on about the cPanel price increase, and how it will affect you, it is best that we first clarify on something.

HOSTFITI is not a web hosting company, but a professional business website builder platform.

If you just want a professional good-looking website without any extras— a simple professional website that showcases your business information and professional email accounts — you can skip traditional web hosting and check out our website builder templates and pricing.

Over the years, people have relied on cPanel for managing their sites.

cPanel’s popularity is because of its integration with Softaculous, LiteSpeed, PHP Selector, JetBackup, CageFS, CloudLinux, Imunify360, and much more. This has helped cPanel become faster, reliable, secure, and feature-rich.

This price increase seems to be a nonstrategic roll out and cPanel has faced major backlash from the web-hosting community!

Users on Twitter reacted with a lot of aggression and mostly negatively with most of them threatening to switch to alternative control panels.

1. End-Users

While servers with a single account can go for cPanel solo, and servers with under 5 accounts still get the same price, the overall price for end-user is comparatively higher for servers having more than 5 accounts.

2. Shared Hosting Providers or Resellers

The worst affected of the whole lot. Mostly, a shared hosting company (most in Kenya) will run around 1000 websites on a single VM with the $11/mo cPanel VM license. After the new changes come into effect, their cPanel license costs will rise to $122/mo! That’s a whopping 1000% increase and almost equivalent to their infrastructure or server costs 😉

3. Unmanaged Server Providers

Generally, unmanaged server providers don’t have the access to the server and therefore, didn’t know how many accounts are on running on a server which was fine because the license was per server.

The new pricing model has added an extra layer of efforts for the providers. Now, they need to have a log of how many accounts are being created on a single server, or else they may end up footing the bill of thousands of dollars!

Who is Going to Get The Hardest Hit?

Shared/Reseller Hosting Providers, who lest assured, will transfer the costs to you as the end user. This include Kenya Web Experts, Truehost, Sasahost etc.

Other effects will be:

  1. Being on the internet is going to get costly with immediate effects.
  2. Shut down of small web hosting companies.
  3. Dark future ahead for Master, Alpha & Super Alpha resellers.
  4. End to the term “Unlimited Accounts”.
  5. As per a thread on a famous forum, around 90% of hosting companies will be affected badly.

Do you think this article will help someone? Don’t forget to share.

Subscribe to be notified about new marketing, entrepreneurship & web development posts.

Make a Professional Website using HostFiti Website Builder

Having a professional business website helps you establish credibility as a business. Make your professional website using our drag and drop website builder in minutes and make it convenient for your customers to contact you.

Starting from [esi hf_starting_pricing ttl="0"] inclusive of bulk SMS, hosting & unlimited email accounts.

Scroll to Top
Scroll to Top