Oakley Capital from the USA, the holding company for cPanel, WHMCS and Plesk has sent out an email yesterday evening detailing their new pricing increase on cPanel which is moving from a per vps or per dedicated server fixed cost to a per account basis.

How big is the impact? well If you have a VPS with say 500 accounts, your pricing is moving from $15.00 (R219 p/m) to $45 for the first 100 accounts and then $0.20 per account after that. so $45 + (400 accounts x $0.20) = $125 per month ( roughly R1825).  If you have a dedicated cPanel server with say 1000 accounts, your new cPanel pricing will now be up from roughly R600 per month to R3300 per month. Some Hosting companies are seeing a 350% increase overall in cPanel licensing costs as a cPanel Partner.

This is a massive blow to the hosting industry world wide as the entire market is going to have to go up in price. Switching to Plesk isn’t going to help much, since they all owned by Oakley Capital.

From the onset, it looks like the idea of unlimited accounts for resellers is going to have to be curbed and changed to fixed accounts where the number of accounts are billed for.

With unemployment figures reaching record highs in SA, with a Government that does not do much to support small business, this is an ultimate shocker and comes as a April Fools to be honest.

Hosting resellers are offered 21 calendar days to absorb this change and communicate this to their client base.

Hosting businesses will take a serious knock, specially where quotes are already out and also where clients pay for hosting on an annual basis.