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HostMantis - Important Announcement Regarding Recent cPanel Price Increase
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Comments
lawl.
I love how this is "pro" - corporate again.
What the fk do I care if a company goes "bell up" @poisson?
It's their ridiculous 80% off pricing and discounts which made their business model unsustainable. Even promising that the discount was recurring, is just amazing. So either they suck it up and stay with their promise or people are free to refund and quit.
If the price increase is required to prevent the company from going bell up, then it's fine. But then also don't force me to stick to "my" part of the deal.
Enough competition around that "new" pricing and the new 25% is just another way of making it look like a deal. The regular price is prop. never paid by anyone. Sad but true and anyone following / believing that discounts and business "concept" with just loose their stuff sooner / later.
And saying that the math to calculate the cPanel - Increase is "soooo complicated", is just another excuse. Not like it's a big secret what they charge, so that increase by HM are just shameless.
Cheers!
I think its fair, they have to protect their business in response to cPanels ransom demands, the really unfortunate part is though that cPanel is now in the grip of a VC that will just see profit and ignore fall out, so I expect next year "to reflect value" they will push the price up to $0.30 p/account, and within 5 years it swill be $1 per account.
HostMantis and its (loyal) Customers right now
cPanel is NOT going to reverse the per account fee.
There is no cure for stupid it seems.
By mentality of LET, that'd be yes.
"Give me what I need for dirt cheap as long as you can. When you go down, I will find another sucker."
That is why the price increases are so steep. If everyone can agree to pay the difference for whatever remaining period they have with Hostmantis that cPanel is charging under the new pricing structure, nobody needs to be pay for others. Problem is it won't happen because some replies have shown that for some people, it is ok that others suffer financially as long as they don't.
Sofia_K right about now...
Then they get alpharacked!
a demented prisoners dilemma / Milgram experiment mashup
an interesting analysis, professor Poisson
You make a valid point but you and others in this thread seem to be completely missing that they actually don't honor the prices of the current billing period for a lot of customers with reseller accounts and that is a big problem here.
I and many others have probably no problem paying what cPanel is charging them for the individual cPanel accounts with the new licensing model if they kept the recurring discount for the package and simply said listen, we value you as a customer and would like to continue doing business but we need to charge you $8 - $10 extra a month if you want to keep cPanel functionality to cover the new licensing model of cPanel and we made a mistake calculating our prices so if you don't agree to this we might go bankrupt.
Alternatively we honor our contractual agreement and would provide you with a free replacement Panel if you allow us to do so or offer you a full refund to make this mistake on our end right.
I am no lawyer but I've been having contracts with small clients up to Fortune 500 companies for over ten years so from my understanding if we speak about contract law, when you signed up for their reseller plan with their offer in May the contractual obligations of HostMantis included the following specifications.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190215000138/https://www.hostmantis.com/reseller-hosting.html
I think we can both agree that the essential feature of the service of reseller hosting is to create isolated webhosting environments that you are allowed to commercially resell. I would call this industry wide accepted definition of what reseller hosting and its purpose is and therefore what the purpose of the contract is.
So the contract they and you agreed to is charging X amount of money paid for a year upfront to provide the functionality of creating isolated webhosting environments for 50 clients realized over cPanel Accounts and providing the other features on that sales page on a specific reseller hosting server you could chose from.
Now they have a modification clause in the ToS that allows them to discontinue, upgrade, replace, modify, or change in any way, without limitation, any software, application, program, data, hardware, equipment, or portions or components thereof, used to provide customers with HostMantis services.
So they are completely fine to discontinue or modify the amount of cPanel accounts you create but according to contract law the overall functionality of the contract has to be intact with those changes, meaning even if they discontinue cPanel i should be able to create 50 isolated webhosting environments.
It's a breach of contract if one party fails to perform their obligations under the contract in whole or in part or fulfill any term of a contract without a justifiable, lawful excuse.
Being greedy and not calculating risk properly in your pricing is not a justifiable, lawful excuse. If I ask you to build me a house and suddenly the cheap mexican supply for your concrete dries up you can't just go and charge me a quarter mil extra for the foundation I already paid for if we agreed that you build me a foundation of size X in time Y for a fixed price that you offered me in the first place.
But let us stick with the current example. By effective immediately lowering the number of isolated webhosting environments from 50 to 10 for the reseller entry plan without offering an alternative they modified the contract one-sided in a way that no longer allows the other party in the contract to make use of the core functionality of the service they paid for. It invalidates the sole purpose of the contract, which is to be able to create 50 isolated environments for 50 clients on your end for the price you agreed on and they offered you.
Now on top of taking 80% of that core functionality away you add insult to the whole thing of trying to modify the contract effective immediately without my permission by offering to restore said functionality we agreed upon in the first place for a hefty premium, in this case over 850% a year for a total of over 1000% price increase in the next billing cycle if we calculate the lowering of the recurring discount in as well.
You'd be insane to accept those one-sided changes to your contract without your permission. There is no way you could have planned in for a 1000% increase in cost when you planned to make use of the 50 client capacity on the plan you paid for and it's in no way ethical or reasonable to raise prices by that amount in order to "compensate" for the cPanel pricing changes as we can all see what those changes are and how they influence you as a customer individually and on top of that they are not even live yet, so HostMantis right now is not losing a single cent on the services they provide.
It doesn't make me angry because it's not the first time I had to deal people like that in my life but I have a few simple core believes. One is that you should keep your word and not be dishonorable / dishonest and also that you should get what you paid for and deliver what was promised to others.
Removing the ability to resell hosting to 40 clients without paying a 800% premium in my book is trying to f*ck someone over big time.
Where i grew up you'd get shot if you robbed the plug and then tried to sell his product back to him. Luckily today I am in a position where I don't need to do that but can use the full force of the law and it won't make a dent in my pocket even if it's basically stupid to spend a few grand in legal fees on a $10 purchase.
But you either let someone fck you or you don't and I personally don't like to be fcked with and allow people to get away with it. And that the lady at the FTC told me I am completely right with my view on this tells me I am not that wrong with how I look at the whole thing.
And this is as much time as I am willing to spend on this for today.
Time will tell what will happen.
Rinse and repeat.
Few might get sick (aka learning from its mistake) and find a decent host but the majority will rinse and repeat.
Because knowing that a 275% price increase is just around the corner, I do not want to spend any time moving websites/clients onto their platform. As such, the rest of the time I have paid for is now not worth anything to me.
If they are really losing money on me, aren't we both better off if they close my account now and refund the unused portion of my already paid for time?
Actually I'm doing this right now as few days b4 the 27th June I renewed my shared/reseller hosting plans for 2.5 to 3 years on various hosts
Have a great day!
Didn't expect to get good reseller hosting for 3 years at 20 $.
Call me naive if you like, but I didn't rely (too much) on those prices and that hosting.
Anyway, the options on the table, the way I see it:
1) Suck it up
2) Alpharacks - migrating websites
Insisting on the current deals = Alpharacks, of course, wish I were wrong.
Alright well it is the same shit but a different day. I'm going to close this topic. If you really have something different to say I will open the topic .