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HostMantis - Important Announcement Regarding Recent cPanel Price Increase
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Premium SSD Web Hosting - Entry Plan - (SGP)
First Payment Amount $3.30 USD
Recurring Amount $12.36 USD
The end is nigh.
Shitty times, eh?
I do understand the price increase for reseller, $2.4/y * 10accs * 3years = $72, but your shared hosting customers are facing excessive price hikes that is way over the addition of the cPanel license price and payment gateway fees. And for people like me whose mostly using it for personal usage and idling, the $50 increase in reseller is quite big. That said, I wouldn't mind being moved to DA, even if it means being a paid beta tester, as long as the prices stays the same.
I am not saying you guys are unreasonable, but the increase in shared hosting is a bit high imo. We are doing the maths too.
In addition, at least for LET, some people don't even need 10 accounts but just something they can play / idle with. Launching a "Reseller Mini" could help too.
@HostMantis If you are losing money on the plans we signed up for, why not give us the option to accept a refund for the unused portion of our plan. Then you can stop losing money on our accounts.
Your announced plan sounds self-serving because your price increase is out of proportion to cpanel's price hike. You have every right to set the prices at whatever works for you. However, at this point it is not worth my time to move any websites over to you knowing that the renewal rate is going to be so high. At these prices I think a VPS is a better option for me. Just refund the unused portion of my 1 year payment and I'll be on my way.
I have a shared plan, not reseller. I paid for a higher plan for more CPU and RAM, not to gobble up cPanel instance. When renewal time comes you're going to have to be creative. At the reduced 25% coupon there are many other options. DA and the current coupon and I'll likely stay.
Other than that, uptime had been excellent and ping and loadtimes more than satisfactory.
Hope you have reseller plan with DA and provide option to reseller that doesn't want to pay new price
>
Glad I just upgraded. When my service is due I'm switching to Hetzner. Kind of the same price.
I am here. Embrace the end.
For the record:
I have one account. The increase is 0.2 x 12 (2.4) or 0.1 x 12 (1.2) a year for Hostmantis. The increase in my price is about 23 USD. That's either 10x the cPanel price increase or 20x the cPanel price increase.
All according to my calculations. Would be happy to try and back it up for review.
I am.
@emgh I think your math reaches the right conclusion. From what I read, for the shared accounts, cpanel has increased HostMantis' cost by about $2.40/year. By reducing its recurring discount from 80% to 25%, HostMantis has increased your price by $23/year -- almost 10x the cpanel price increase. This is so out of proportion that HostMantis should not put the blame on cpanel.
Also, in addition, @HostMantis - Why aren't you a cPanel partner? You probably have got plenty of licences. That'd be half of the price. Or are you but stating the .2 per account in the mail for a more dramatic effect?
That's correct. If this is the final price, upon renewal (.80 discount -> .25) after the year is up, either DA (with .80 coupon) or I'll have to host elsewhere.
You have to own your own IP's, you can't become a partner and be sitting on someone elses IP's from what I've seen.
I could be wrong, but sounds very messy.
Francisco
@Francisco I think what we are all just realizing is that HostMantis' price increase has little to do with cPanel.
so number of cpanel accounts are decreased under reseller from 25 to 10 for entry level plan
10 cpanel X 0.20 $/month X 12 months = 24$ 1 year cpanel licence cost
original price for entry level reseller plan was 9.68$ after promo code for 12 months and new one is 36.30$ as displayed in clientarea for renewal
36.30-24 = 12.3$ for hosting without cpanel
hope my calculation is not wrong
i guess hostmantis should provide option to move over DA if user do not want to pay extra for cpanel licence
I'll do my best to not shit on them in their own thread.
What I can say is they aren't the 1st i'm sure, and it won't be the last to do this with these changes. It's the perfect chance to do it and you have a legitimate reason for it.
Too many people running too close to the bone when they're on mostly/entirely rented infrastructure.
Francisco
They made my 25 off a 50 off. That makes the price 12 something instead of 4.8. The price should rather be 7.2.
A lot better, still not good.
First Payment Amount$13.99 USD
Recurring Amount$52.46 USD
On a shared account. Not reseller.
@HostMantis , Yeah, no thanks. Instead of incorrectly using cPanel's announcement to justify shared account price increases and not just reseller ones, maybe be more forthcoming.
Cancellation already requested at end of billing period.
I think this announcement from HostMantis is premature. It really doesn't make sense.
Give us the option to use DA instead of cPanel, at the same renewal price as when we signed up.
My guess is DA - the cost in migration, extra support and QA will eat up all the profits and the old coupons will no longer fly.
I have the Shared Expert plan and 2 resellers (Singapore, AU and Canada) from HM, just for fun/idle. Ridiculous renewal for the shared plan. Much cheaper if I'll just get myself a VPS elsewhere. Thanks, it was a great 2 years with you.
@Francisco I don't want to shit on them either. However, problems cannot be solved if we are not able to hear honest feedback. By raising their prices by 10x their increase in cpanel costs they are taking advantage of all of us who took them up on their recent offer. Since the deal has changed so much in their favor, I want my money back for the unused portion of the year I pre-paid. If I don't get it back, I'll live with the loss, but I will never want to do business with them again.
In my case the recurring is $36,30 up from $9,86 so 275%.
But the thing that made me laugh the hardest is they also offer me to get my 50 cPanel accounts back that I already paid for for only 2$/10 cPanel Accounts x 4 = 8$ / 40 cPanel accounts a month or $96 a year to have the original plan restored.
They are selling you something you already paid for for over 800% upsell and keep blaming cPanel for it
this is so akward seeing this.
I also love how support just closed my ticket by telling me "Please keep in mind, this is not simply us making a money grab." And then be like "go f*ck yourself" by just closing it again when I asked them to clarify a few things for me. Of course it's not a cash grab, jacking up prices by 1000% for customers is a completey ethical and sane thing to do in return of another company asking you for 20 cents more a month per cPanel account.
What a dumpster fire.
I'll have to make a few calls tomorrow morning to see if its covered or would cost me any extra if my legal expense insurance has a look into this just for the fun of it. Maybe there is some profit to be made out of this in the end.
Well, at the least, they are living up to their brand name.
The mantis has got the perfect opportunity to scythe.
We welcome feedback and know it's not always going to be positive. We did the math and this was the solution we came up with in order to continue offering the level of service and features we currently do and not go bankrupt doing so.
Several here and also at WHT keep saying DirectAdmin, DirectAdmin, DirectAdmin. The majority of our clients still want cPanel as their control panel. so we are currently testing DirectAdmin to possibly offer it as a low cost alternate option.
We've never used DirectAdmin prior to this, so we are learning the quirks, etc. and are just not comfortable yet providing it as a paying service if the setup is not ready for production, so it will take a bit of time before we offer it as an alternative.
Like a few of the earlier posters, I have a shared plan from HostMantis and not a reseller plan.
From one perspective, I was happy to see that HostMantis taking a proactive approach in addressing the situation caused by the significant change in cPanel pricing. I realize they are not in the hosting business to lose money and understand they will need to raise prices to stay in business.
For the reseller accounts from most any host, cPanel account limits will unfortunately become the new reality. That said, I feel the approach outlined in HostMantis’ email is at least somewhat close to reasonable. For the additional cPanel account credits, it looks like they are basically passing along the price of the additional cPanel accounts on a server.
On the other hand, the price increase for my shared housing account is a bit more than I would have expected. The primary reason for this is the extreme 80% recurring discount I got when I purchased the hosting package compared to the new 25% recurring discount.
Thinking about what I feel would be a reasonable approach for shared hosting account, my thought would be to add something like a flat $5/year cPanel surcharge per shared hosting accounts.
If HostMantis did something like this, people could keep their current recurring discount for the shared hosting plan but that discount would not apply to the flat $5/year fee. One potential issue with such an approach is if their current billing software could handle something like this.
As other have already pointed out, the cost of a single additional cPanel account is probably $2.40/year. Personally, I would not be too concerned about HostMantis making any extra $2.60/year from me if it keeps them in business for the long haul.
With such an approach, the total cost of my shared hosting plan would still double going from about $5/year to $10/year. I feel that would still be a good deal given my experience to date with HostMantis and realizing the additional cost is the result of the cPanel price increase. However, with the new 25% discount, my shared hosting plan will go from $5/year to $18.66/year which seems to be a bit excessive.
My final thought concerns what I think HostMantis could have done better relative this announcement. Given that the cPanel price increases don’t go into effect until September 1, I believe it would have been better for them to post a “draft version” of this change on LET and ask for comments. This way, they could have gotten some feedback on the change and make some updates based on feedback from the LET community.
So your shared hosting plan price increases, which have nothing to do with cPanel are a result of calculations you made which pointed to you going bankrupt.
Got it, so your plans were never sustainable and the price increase has nothing to do with cPanel.
Backup your data folks. @deank The end is nigh indeed lmao.
I only had an account with you for an empty landing page so I can use up-time monitors for HostMantis (which gives 17 outages totaling 53 minutes for the month of June), so no biggie for me. But your lack of ethics and lack of transparency is disgusting.
@HostMantis You are totally within your rights to increase your prices as much as you want. If you were losing money on the 80% recurring discount that many of us signed up for, you should say so and stop blaming cpanel. The cpanel price increase does not take effect until September, but I am willing to stop costing you money right now if you refund me the unused portion of the year I already paid for. If you do that, then when (if) you come up with a plan that is attractive to me, I will consider it. Otherwise, I'll count my loss as the price of learning how you do business. At least I will have learned my lesson before transitioning any websites/clients over to your services.