As cPanel Raises Prices Again, Hosts Say Enough Is Enough

Web hosting platform cPanel announced its new pricing for 2026. Pricing will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2026, for existing licenses, and Dec. 16, 2025, for new ones.

Price plans are going up between $2 and $7 for most tiers, with Pro jumping nearly $5. A new $0.49 per-account fee for servers with more than 100 accounts is also being added.

There’s good news for high-volume users who spend more than $2,000 per month: Previous discounts that were at 6% will now be at 16%. Unfortunately, lower-volume folks will lose their 2% discount altogether.

Jon Berry, the president of Green Olive Tree, a hosting and managed services company, described cPanel’s price increases as “rampant.”

“If you compare back to what they were in 2019, you can see that prices have gone up in most cases over 300%,” said Berry. “This is, however, a symptom of a larger problem — and that is the buy up of hosting related products by venture capital firms.”

That’s the story the hosting industry has been seeing for the past six years — starting when private-equity money entered the picture.

cPanel switched to a per-account pricing model in 2019, shortly after it — along with Plesk and WHMCS — was acquired by Oakley Capital. The brands were combined under the WebPros umbrella, which now owns both cPanel and Plesk.

Today, WebPros’ majority investor is CVC Capital Partners, a private-equity firm that controls several technology conglomerates and is currently moving to acquire a $1.5 billion majority stake in Namecheap.

Call it the inevitable consequence of venture-capital consolidation — or, what some in the space now joke as vampire capitalism.

“This has effectively cornered the market in control panels and related software,” said Berry. “This lack of competition has stifled competition and hindered development, in my opinion.”

Still, Berry said he sees a silver lining: The mounting pricing pressure from cPanel is inspiring new competition.

“Enhance Control Panel is one to watch; I think they are on an interesting path. Though we are still not using it today, we are keeping an eye on it,” he added. “And there are others out there just starting to get going. ModulesGarden has one in beta called AdminBolt which might be interesting to watch as well.”

While no publicly available dataset shows how many users have migrated off cPanel, tools like Google Trends suggest that interest is diminishing.

Berry said he’s also heard through the grapevine that cPanel’s number of licenses is shrinking each year. So instead of growing revenue by attracting new users, the company is raising prices on the remaining ones to make its financials look better.

This is all conjecture, of course. But regardless, some hosting providers have already decided to draw the line with cPanel.

ScalaHosting saw the writing on the wall early: It began developing its own control panel in 2018, which is the same year cPanel, Plesk, and WHMCS were absorbed. Fast forward a couple of years later, the result was SPanel, a proprietary control panel included at no extra cost across all ScalaHosting cloud plans.

“Reseller hosting has become increasingly unviable, and licensing costs have multiplied by ten in some cases. That’s why we decided to take full control of our stack,” Hristo Rusev, the company’s CEO, told HostingAdvice.

According to Rusev, around 10% of ScalaHosting’s existing cPanel users move to SPanel each month. Almost all of its new sign-ups tend to consistently choose SPanel over cPanel, too.

Based on how Rusev described it, the pitch must be a simple one: “This model allows us to shield the majority of our clients from rising licensing fees and maintain competitive pricing without compromising on quality.”

It’s hard to tell how cPanel is handling the backlash behind closed doors. Since the company isn’t publicly traded, it doesn’t disclose license volumes, user counts, or revenue data. What we do know comes from its customers — and most aren’t happy.

cPanel said the price increase is a result of its new features that have added value to the platform, including built-in server monitoring, AI website generator in Sitejet Builder, AI app builder, and site quality monitoring.

But these features haven’t impressed the masses. On Reddit and hosting forums, admins are venting about “paying more for features nobody asked for.”

These new features end up competing with the host’s own offerings, inflating license costs whether the host wants them or not.

The Sitejet Builder, for instance, is a customer-facing builder that lets end users create websites directly inside cPanel. That means they can almost skip the hosting provider altogether — the very people who already offer the services cPanel just added.

Berry calls it “a bad marker,” warning that the current approach “can’t continue for another five to ten years.”

Rusev agrees: “The model might be financially sustainable for cPanel in the short term,” Rusev said, “but the real question is whether the product still justifies the cost — and from our perspective, the answer is increasingly no.”