WebPros has started telling cPanel partners that prices go up again in 2027. The message reached hosting companies on October 1 as an email from a partner manager, under the subject line “I’m sorry, it’s happening again: price increase 2027,” and it contains no figures, no effective date and no reasons. It says that “WebPros will be adjusting prices in 2027,” that the company has “put measures in place to make the impact on your business lighter, including a Partner Incentive Program designed to give value back to you and help you grow,” and that the sender would “rather walk you through the details than summarize them in an email.” A call is offered. “The official communication will follow shortly.”
That is the whole of what is known, and it is enough to place the event. cPanel’s list price has risen in every year but one since the company abandoned per-server licensing in June 2019, the 2026 increase took effect on January 1 after an October announcement, and the public price page still shows the 2026 figures. What has changed around the licence is more important than the licence itself. A shared-hosting server running cPanel in 2026 carries, on cPanel’s own price page, more money in add-ons than in the panel, and the security advisories of the past five months have landed on exactly that stack. The 2027 figures will tell hosts how much more the panel costs. The arithmetic below shows why, for many of them, that is no longer the deciding number.
Key facts
- The notice: an October 1 email from a WebPros partner manager says prices will be “adjusted” in 2027, names a Partner Incentive Program without terms, and offers a phone call before “the official communication.” No prices, date or justification have been published.
- The list today: Solo $29.99 for one account, Admin $35.99 for up to 5, Pro $53.99 for up to 30, Premier $69.99 for up to 100 and $0.49 for each account above that, effective since January 1, 2026.
- The curve since 2019: Solo from $15 to $29.99 (up 99.9 percent), Admin from $20 to $35.99 (80 percent), Pro from $30 to $53.99 (80 percent), Premier from $45 to $69.99 (55.5 percent), the overage from $0.20 to $0.49 (145 percent). Before June 2019 an unlimited-account licence was $20 a month on a VPS and $45 on a dedicated server.
- The rest of the bill: cPanel’s own page prices CloudLinux at $16.80, Imunify360 at $45, LiteSpeed Web Server at $25, KernelCare at $3 and JetBackup at $8.95 a month. On a 100-account Premier server those five add $98.75 to a $69.99 licence.
- What the licence now bundles: since cPanel AI went generally available on September 17, the price page lists Meridian, the AI Assistant, AI App Hosting and MCP under every tier.
Seven Years of a Price List That Only Moves One Way
The 2019 change is the one every later increase builds on. Until June 2019 cPanel sold a licence per server, $20 a month for a VPS and $45 for a dedicated machine, with no limit on accounts; The Register reported the switch to per-account tiers at the time, with Admin at $20, Pro at $30, Premier at $45 and $0.20 for every account above 100, alongside the existing $15 Solo tier. A host with 300 accounts on one dedicated server went from $45 a month to $85 overnight. The same server today costs $167.99: $69.99 for Premier plus 200 accounts at $0.49.
The steps since then, from our record of the lists: no change through 2020; Admin, Pro and Premier up in January 2021 and again in December 2021, December 2022 and December 2023; then the largest single move, the January 2025 list that took Solo from $17.49 to $26.99 and introduced the $0.45 overage; then January 2026, which took the four tiers to $29.99, $35.99, $53.99 and $69.99 and the overage to $0.49. The 2026 step was 11.1 percent on Solo, 9.1 on Admin, 14.9 on Pro and 6.1 on Premier. Over seven years Solo has doubled, Admin and Pro are up 80 percent and the per-account overage, the number that scales with a shared host’s business, is up 145 percent.
cPanel’s explanation for the 2026 step, in its message to partners, was “continued investments in stability, performance, and security” and a list of additions: an AI website generator, SocialBee and Comet Backup integrations, an AI app builder and support agent then “upcoming,” European Accessibility Act compliance, NGINX support and WHMCS integration. Most of that list shipped this year as cPanel AI, which reached general availability on September 17 with Meridian, the AI Assistant, AI App Hosting and MCP support inside every licence tier, and with Nova, the AI site builder, sold separately to partners in credits. The 2027 email does not say whether the Partner Incentive Program is tied to those products, and WebPros has published no terms. The phone-first approach is itself new: last year the justification went to partners in writing.
The Licence Is Now the Smallest Line on the Bill
What per-account pricing did not change is what else a shared server needs, and here cPanel’s own price page is the clearest source. Beside the four tiers it lists the add-ons it resells: CloudLinux OS at $16.80 a month, Imunify360 at $45, LiteSpeed Web Server at $25, KernelCare at $3 and JetBackup at $8.95, with WHMCS at $34.95 and SocialBee at $29. None of those is mandatory. All five of the first group are what a shared host buys to do the things cPanel used to be sold as doing on its own: isolating accounts, blocking attacks, serving PHP at speed, patching the kernel without a reboot and taking backups.
Put together on a 100-account Premier server, the licence is $69.99 and the five add-ons are $98.75, a total of $168.74 a month before billing software, or $1.69 per account. Add WHMCS and it is $2.04. The licence is 41 percent of the first figure. On the 300-account server above, the licence line grows to $167.99 while the add-ons stay flat, so the share swings back, but the point stands: a 2027 increase of the size of recent ones moves a shared host’s cost per account by cents, and the hosts that have been leaving cPanel have been leaving over the whole stack, not the panel line.
The stack has also been where the security work has been. In September LiteSpeed Enterprise 6.3.7 went through three security builds in six days after a cPanel advisory on a path from a hosting account to root; cPanel patched a root escalation reachable from an ordinary account’s mail privileges the same month. Every one of those required a host to act on servers whose licence and add-on fees had just gone up. The 2026 justification, “stability, performance, and security,” reads differently against that calendar.
Where the Hosts Are Going
The reaction to the October 1 email, in the WebHostingTalk thread where it surfaced, is less about the price than about the exit, and the exits named are the ones we have been reporting all year. One reseller that runs cPanel and DirectAdmin side by side says the two now differ only in interface and price, and that it has never had to tell a client a task was possible on one and not the other. Another, selling both for two decades, says DirectAdmin’s user interface has caught up while WHM remains richer for administrators, and adds the observation that cuts deepest for a panel vendor: most of its customers log in to WordPress and never open the panel at all. Two hosts describe building their own panels with AI coding tools, one calling the result an Enhance and Plesk hybrid that already handles containerised PHP, DNS, MariaDB, mail and multi-server deployment, with no plans yet to run it in production. When we surveyed providers on cPanel in February, DirectAdmin and Enhance were already reporting migration interest from hosts “looking for predictable long-term licensing.”
WebPros owns the two obvious alternatives to one another. Plesk’s 2026 list rose by approximately 26 percent on average with annual plans being phased out, and WHMCS repriced its tiers from January 1, 2026, both of which we reported in October 2025. A host that wants out of the WebPros price cycle therefore has to leave the WebPros portfolio, which means DirectAdmin, Enhance, a panel of its own, or one of the newer entrants such as AdminBolt, which we covered at its beta in October 2025. Each of those is a migration project, and migration projects are what the Partner Incentive Program, whatever it contains, is presumably meant to forestall.
The 2027 figures will arrive in writing, as the email promises. When they do, the number to compare them with is not last year’s list but the per-account cost of the whole server, and the question for a host is whether a panel that is 41 percent of that cost on a full Premier licence is worth the annual conversation about it.
About the Data
The email text is quoted from the WebHostingTalk thread “cPanel: Price increase 2027,” opened on October 1, 2026, as supplied to us in full by a reader; the forum returns a 403 to automated requests, and the reseller positions summarised above are drawn from the same thread’s posts of October 2 to 4 without naming the posters. Current list prices, add-on prices and the AI features per tier are from cpanel.net/pricing as displayed on October 5, 2026. The 2019 to 2026 price history and cPanel’s 2026 justification are from our October 14, 2025 article; the June 2019 tiers, the per-server prices they replaced and the $0.20 overage are from The Register’s report of June 28, 2019. All percentage changes, the $85, $167.99, $168.74, $1.69, $2.04 and 41 percent figures are our arithmetic on those lists. The Partner Incentive Program is described only as the email describes it; WebPros has published no terms we could find. WebPros was not contacted for this article.
