Why cPanel Has Raised Prices Every Year Since 2019 (and What to Expect in 2027)

Anyone running a server with cPanel knows the drill: every new year brings the risk of an extra line on the panel invoice. It's not just a feeling. It's a pattern that has held for seven consecutive years, and one worth unpacking, because the reasons are financial rather than technical.

The change of ownership

It all starts with a private equity deal. Oakley Capital acquired Plesk in May 2017 and cPanel in August 2018, merging the two brands under the same holding company, WebPros BV. The two panels remain separate brands but share ownership, pricing strategy and management. In 2020 control changed hands again: CVC Capital Partners, through its Fund VII, bought WebPros from Oakley. The result: the two leading control panels for Linux hosting have had the same shareholder for six years, with all that implies in terms of competitive pressure on pricing (essentially none).

The 2019 pricing model shift

Before the acquisition, a cPanel licence cost a flat fee regardless of the number of hosted accounts. Prior to 2019, a cPanel licence cost around $20 a month for unlimited accounts — whether you hosted 5 sites or 500, the price was the same. On 27 June 2019 came the announcement that changed everything: from 1 September 2019, cPanel would move from a flat per-server fee to per-account pricing, a structural change that rippled through the entire industry and reshaped the unit economics of thousands of resellers and providers. For those running servers with hundreds of accounts, the jump was immediate: costs went from $20 a month to hundreds of dollars a month, overnight. cPanel offered a transition window, but it wasn't enough to cushion the blow: existing customers were given a year at 50% off, yet even discounted, the increase remained steep for many small and mid-sized operators.

Seven years of price hikes and the industry's verdict

Since then, increases have become routine, almost always landing around year-end. The latest, for 2026, follows the same script: new prices from 1 January 2026 for existing licences and from 16 December 2025 for new ones, with hikes ranging from $2 to $7 depending on the tier.

Year	Event	Source
August 2018	Oakley Capital acquires cPanel	taskade.com
June–September 2019	shift from flat licensing to per-account pricing, launch of Premier at $32/month for 100 accounts	adminbolt.com
2020	CVC Capital Partners takes over WebPros from Oakley	taskade.com
2020–2024	incremental increases across all tiers, every year	adminbolt.com
January 2026	Solo +$2, Admin +$1.25, Pro +$4.75, Premier +$2.50, overage from $0.44 to $0.49/account	hostingadvice.com

The verdict from those working on the front lines is blunt. Jon Berry, president of Green Olive Tree, has described cPanel's price increases as "rampant", pointing out that compared with 2019 prices have in many cases risen by more than 300% — a symptom of a bigger problem tied to venture capital and private equity firms buying up hosting products. For its part, cPanel justifies the increases by pointing to new features added to the platform, including built-in server monitoring and AI-powered site-building tools.

What to expect in 2027 (a hypothesis, not a certainty)

There is no official announcement on 2027 pricing: this writer has no visibility into WebPros' internal plans. Based purely on the pattern observed since 2019 — an increase every January, ranging from 5% to 17% on base tiers and growing faster on the per-account fee above 100 users — it's reasonable to expect another tightening of the screws in early 2027, likely announced between November and December 2026. But this is a projection, not a fact: anyone planning a 2027 budget would do well to check the official price list as soon as it's published, rather than relying on this or any other estimate.