Question Backup to cloud pro not included in Web Host licenses?

[websavers]

Hey Plesk folks...

A few months back, Plesk nearly doubled their partner licensing fees, making a Web Host License actually *more* costly than a cPanel license. OK, I can (barely) stomach that.

But now, even new functionality which should have existed for years -- the ability to allow clients to backup on a schedule to cloud services like Amazon S3 -- cost us extra? We're already paying a premium for having a web host license and yet you want us to pay even more for features that should be baked in? I can't say I'm pleased about that. What's the point of upgrading to new releases if *all* the great new features are going to cost us more money?

Additionally, with earlier releases of the Dropbox plugin customers could set schedules for their backups. The plugin was horribly broken in many ways and needed to be fixed, but you've left us with two options:

1) Pay more to get the same functionality we had before, or
2) Remove scheduled backup to Dropbox functionality

Neither of which are great.

The reality is as follows, and I think the Plesk team should pay serious attention to this as it affects your long-term revenues. I highly doubt we're the only ones thinking along these lines. Our previous server strategy was to use larger numbers of less powerful machines so as to distribute the load with better precision and reduce the impact of outages as they would be contained to individual machines. This also happened to benefit Plesk because we'd be buying new licenses regularly.

However in order to ensure our growth plan is economically feasible when we have to deal with *both* Plesk core licensing increases *and* regular money grabs like "Backup to cloud Pro", we now have no choice but to revise our server strategy. We will be changing to using bigger servers that require less overall licenses and therefore our regular purchasing of licenses will decrease overall thanks to these pricing changes.

Also keep in mind that in the next two years, a large number of hosting providers are going to be forced to migrate their massive quantities of CentOS 6 machines to CentOS 7 (because there's no upgrade path), and in that process, I'm willing to bet that *many* of them are going to be considering merging machines simply to get their licensing fees back to what they were in 2017, prior to the license fee changes.

Setting your pricing model in a manner that encourages your customers to buy less from you does not seem like a good idea to me. Is this really the kind of change you want?

 

[edenweb]

Hi @websavers
I was hoping your post had more replies. Possibly there are other threads on the same topic.

Agree completely re. the Plesk pricing increase and now the Dropbox extension moving to a paid service.

Heading into 2019, we've decided to review all our Plesk subscriptions and have decided to do the following.

• 4 x VPS servers we have are going to be consolidated down to 2 as we'll move subscriptions onto 2 servers.
• Later in 2019, we'll offload lower traffic subscriptions to a cheaper alternative

Effectively by the end of 2019 we'll have 1 Plesk license instead of 4. I imagine many more are doing the same. It's a pity as I love using Plesk but we can't incur those costs and nor would we ask our clients to do the same.

In many ways, this pricing hike for Plesk has been counterproductive. I'd rather take the inconvenience of moving sites etc than getting locked into a short-sighted revenue grab from loyal customers.

 

[websavers]

We, too, are a bit surprised that we haven't seen many other hosts commenting on this. I suspect perhaps it's at least in part due to massive hosts having excellent partner pricing savings. Or perhaps the they're simply discussing it quietly on other forums; we simply believe that direct feedback still might have the power to affect change.

As Plesk users since 2004, we've benefited from exactly what the Plesk team described as improvements to their panel without price increases for more than a decade. They probably should have been steadily increasing their pricing over that period of time, and I both understand and fully accept the need for price increases. What I want to emphasize is two key facts and items that I think should become actionable change on their part:

1. I strongly believe that the web host edition licensing should include all features which could be considered a core functionality of hosting, including cloud backup. The functionality that could be considered core functionality of hosting will obviously change over time; that's how industries work, especially the tech sector.
2. The pricing needs to reflect the value provided, and especially in comparison to their biggest competitor, cPanel

Here's just a few functions that cPanel provides which Plesk does not, yet Plesk's pricing is actually slightly more costly now: nginx http/2-alpn support on CentOS 6; DNS templates for automatically applying G Suite and other email provider settings to the account with one click; out-of-the-box support for mail autodiscover functionality. And I'm sure there's others I'm forgetting right now. This isn't to say I want to use cPanel, it's just to say that pricing needs to be set to match the competition's features and even if Plesk falls short in some of those ways, they *could* claim an advantage in other ways, like with cloud backup... *if* it didn't cost extra.

 

[dash]

Hi,

We started to invest more engineering efforts to our backup system and since Plesk Onyx 17.8 we added different cloud storages pluged in our backup engine and Plesk UI with full support of all Plesk backup features: Amazon S3, Google Drive, One Drive, sFTP storage, Google Cloud, DropBox reworked.

So, what did our customers get with new reworked DropBox extension?

• Incremental backups: works faster, saves your server performance and diskspace.
• More flexible scheduler (was only “daily” before).
• Granular restoration with user’s self-management: user can restore only particular object from the backup, specific mailbox, database or specific site.
• More options to control end-customers permissions.

Subscription’s scheduler become paid, yes (btw, it’s free for server backup) and one license unlocks this functionality for all Cloud destinations, not just to one of them.

As a product owner of Plesk backup subsystem, I see people are interested in a high-integrated backup solution that goes forward, so I would rather prefer more to invest than to get. The life is that it’s nearly the same.

And you are absolutely right, direct feedback is really important!
Thanks for yours,

 

[jibran]

Hi, I respect both sides of this issue. @dash your backup subsystem team is doing good work! However, I don't believe you addressed the actual concerns of @websavers position.

If someone is paying for a "Web Host Edition" license, why wouldn't scheduled off-site backups be part of the subscription? For web hosts this is a critical feature! Instead of being nickel'd and dime'd to death. Maybe you're not the person to ask this, but I'm just throwing it out there. I shudder to suggest this, but a solution could be a third tier that includes more add-ons by default, but saves your customers money.

Another issue @edenweb brought up is that they will have to go from 4 Plesk licenses to 1 in the coming months. Sounds like multi-license pricing could solve that and again, save us money and keep your loyal customers happier(-ish).

Thanks for listening.