Input Enormous price increases yet again for 2025

[cptplastic]

For regular users without specific requirements, any panel works fine. Btw I'm happy for the free year offered by ISPmanager if you migrate from Plesk or cPanel. These guys genuinely want to help their users.

Welp, I tried I just could not do it. ispmanager is not supporting USD $ not that its a huge deal breaker but they now are putting a limit of "You have 30days to migrate or mother Russia comes down on you." I just cant get behind that. The panel looks nice but at the end of the day we are talking about a few bucks here and lets be real PLESK is just better. I'm not a huge fan of there price hike and ill be dumping PLESK this year at some point but for the near term ill be eating this cost "Again" but Ill say that I wont be bringing anymore people onto Plesk.

Hopefully this helps the smaller hosts out there decide what to do.

 

[HostaHost]

My Plesk pricing for web host edition was going up about 65%, for a single year, it's ridiculous. I don't care that much about price increases in general, that's the way of life these days, but a massive increase makes me want to change platforms because it makes them too great a risk to my bottom line when they do things like that with little notice. Fortunately I was able to downgrade about 90% of my licenses to web pro edition and my monthly spend is actually going to go down, so in my case their stupid action actually cost them money.

For anyone in the same boat, if you need to bulk downgrade keys, it's easy to do via the key manager API if you have a user/pass established by your sales rep. Just fill in the appropriate credentials in the below, replace OWNERID with your id number from the plesk key manager, and replace KEYID with the actual numeric key ID, just the middle part, so if your key is PLSK.123456.0010 you'd only send the 123456. Additionally, if you have an older key that starts with a leading zero, like PLSK.012345.0002, you have to strip the leading zero and only send 12345. The below would take a key down to Web Pro edition, but can also be used with web app, or the base license.

curl -X PUT -u "username:password" "https://api.central.plesk.com/30/keys/KEYID?return-key-state=yes" -H "Content-Type:application/json;charset=UTF-8" -d '{"ownerId":"OWNERID","keyIdentifiers":{"keyId":KEYID},"items":[{"item":"PLESK-12-VPS-WEB-PRO-1M"}]}'

If you don't have your owner ID, run this against one of your existing keys (add credentials and key id in place of KEYID:

curl -X GET -u "username:password" "https://api.central.plesk.com/30/keys/KEYID" -H "Content-Length:0"

 

[thanosman]

Welp, I tried I just could not do it. ispmanager is not supporting USD $ not that its a huge deal breaker but they now are putting a limit of "You have 30days to migrate or mother Russia comes down on you." I just cant get behind that. The panel looks nice but at the end of the day we are talking about a few bucks here and lets be real PLESK is just better. I'm not a huge fan of there price hike and ill be dumping PLESK this year at some point but for the near term ill be eating this cost "Again" but Ill say that I wont be bringing anymore people onto Plesk.

Hopefully this helps the smaller hosts out there decide what to do.

I understand your concerns, but ispmanager is not forcing you to migrate without reason. They're offering a free year of their panel as part of the transition, which seems like a generous gesture. You can either do nothing and continue paying less than you currently do, or take advantage of the free year as a gift for your trust. Moreover, Plesk also has Russian roots in its history.

 

[seqoi]

Moreover, Plesk also has Russian roots in its history.

Wait what has that do with anything? Don't tell me some nonsense about an ongoing war or something. Plesk existed long long before two or more parties came to unsolvable differences and started a war. So your point is pretty loose.

At this very moment, all EU countries employ hundreds of thousands (official numbers) of Russian people (which had nothing to with the war in most cases) yet you are pointing at Plesk for Russian roots in its history. Hypocrisy.

Wait are you now going to tell me I should eradicate anything that has a Russia label on it? Are you serious? So absurd. By your token, any nation is bad because, for example, someone in Uganda killed someone from Alaska therefore all people in Uganda are bad killers and support killing. What a joke.

Note: I am not from Russia, I don't support war on any country nor am I a Plesk fanboy. Look up my history. Please move absurd political connotations out of this area.

I tried.

 

[cptplastic]

I understand your concerns, but ispmanager is not forcing you to migrate without reason. They're offering a free year of their panel as part of the transition, which seems like a generous gesture. You can either do nothing and continue paying less than you currently do, or take advantage of the free year as a gift for your trust. Moreover, Plesk also has Russian roots in its history.

They are offering a free year IF you migrate within 30days. So off Plesk onto ISPMANAGER. I don't care where its hosted but a large multi hosts system with customers who "need to know everything and schedule everything" 30 days is just not realistic not to mention the migration path is rough and not without issues as they clearly have said when I chatted with their support. At this time they are not providing professional services and we use that sometimes for larger tasks that we offload.

Dollar to Dollar staying with plesk makes since for medium to large hosting. At the end of the day hopefully some can take this for what its worth when deciding to move to something else minus @seqoi history lesson

 

[manni]

I understand your concerns, but ispmanager is not forcing you to migrate without reason. They're offering a free year of their panel as part of the transition, which seems like a generous gesture. You can either do nothing and continue paying less than you currently do, or take advantage of the free year as a gift for your trust. Moreover, Plesk also has Russian roots in its history.

I have tried ISPmanager now but honestly it is no Short Term Solution, eg API, functions, webalizer… this Needs time…

 

[cptplastic]

I have tried ISPmanager now but honestly it is no Short Term Solution, eg API, functions, webalizer… this Needs time…

That was one of the other issues I faced was the lacking API. It has some functions but when I tried to hook them up to some automation the API functions seemed broken.

 

[bootted]

My Plesk pricing for web host edition was going up about 65%, for a single year, it's ridiculous. I don't care that much about price increases in general, that's the way of life these days, but a massive increase makes me want to change platforms because it makes them too great a risk to my bottom line when they do things like that with little notice. Fortunately I was able to downgrade about 90% of my licenses to web pro edition and my monthly spend is actually going to go down, so in my case their stupid action actually cost them money.

The unpredictability of prices for the upcoming year is a limiting factor for any business. Especially for those managing multiple servers, as various licenses start to add up.

I think the maximum tolerable increase is around +20% YoY. Increases like this year, however, make switching panels very appealing. The same is happening with cPanel. They're betting on people’s reluctance to face a potentially very costly migration, which is understandable. But they will lose all the tech enthusiasts and many hosting providers, who are already being alienated by their partner policies. In short, they’re increasing the average spend but reducing the number of licenses. With the alternatives available on the market today, including free options like CloudPanel, hard times are ahead for Plesk.

 

[cptplastic]

The unpredictability of prices for the upcoming year is a limiting factor for any business. Especially for those managing multiple servers, as various licenses start to add up.

I think the maximum tolerable increase is around +20% YoY. Increases like this year, however, make switching panels very appealing. The same is happening with cPanel. They're betting on people’s reluctance to face a potentially very costly migration, which is understandable. But they will lose all the tech enthusiasts and many hosting providers, who are already being alienated by their partner policies. In short, they’re increasing the average spend but reducing the number of licenses. With the alternatives available on the market today, including free options like CloudPanel, hard times are ahead for Plesk.

AGREE
If they removed the domain limit I think that would be better, not a gamechanger just a nice cost savings. I don't understand the "old-school" license model much these days. I agree that CloudPanel is looking real nice about now. Was cPanel and Plesk owned by the same company at one point?

Anyhow, what I really wanted to post. Recently we had a bunch of servers on ubuntu 18.04 and we wanted to go from 18 to 20.04 or the next LTS version. Its a huge pain in the butt to do this, I'm sure all of you know if you ever done this before. We did a couple and got through it - just OK but I made the choice to use professional services and pay to have the rest done cause its a huge time suck and why not just let the PLESK masters do what they do, or so we thought. Well that was a few months ago and let me tell you its been a nightmare. One would think by paying out the butt for professional services that it would be a seamless process. It is not! The repos are all screwed up, a lot of the services were set to not auto start after reboots and a slew of permission issues with sym-links to old OS **** the list goes on and on. Granted it was less migration work for my guys but its now other work at the basic OS level and even some customer outliers that I wont even count. I'm not sure if anyone has ever used professional services before but based on this I will never do that again.

We ended up doing the rest ourselves because it was such a show. The more I'm reading in these forums the more I'm realizing its going to be a huge migration effort to something we 100% maintain. I wanted to love the relationship with PLESK and have been using it for years since 2012 or some junk. If PLESK is really just trying to make its investors happy they should let them read these forums. If I was an investor id be plenty pissed off at what the future looks like for PLESK. I even did the survey they sent and it asked to pick the to 5 most important features. Most of them I thought "no one asked for this **** to begin with." It just made me mad to even read some of what was asked because it felt like a group of people managing PLESK who have no idea what it even is. I guess we all should have seen this coming when the platform kept getting sold around to other places.

I appreciate you all telling your stories and what you are using now, I defiantly feel like this will be the end for us using PLESK in the future for sure.

 

[HHawk]

AGREE
If they removed the domain limit I think that would be better, not a gamechanger just a nice cost savings. I don't understand the "old-school" license model much these days. I agree that CloudPanel is looking real nice about now. Was cPanel and Plesk owned by the same company at one point?

Anyhow, what I really wanted to post. Recently we had a bunch of servers on ubuntu 18.04 and we wanted to go from 18 to 20.04 or the next LTS version. Its a huge pain in the butt to do this, I'm sure all of you know if you ever done this before. We did a couple and got through it - just OK but I made the choice to use professional services and pay to have the rest done cause its a huge time suck and why not just let the PLESK masters do what they do, or so we thought. Well that was a few months ago and let me tell you its been a nightmare. One would think by paying out the butt for professional services that it would be a seamless process. It is not! The repos are all screwed up, a lot of the services were set to not auto start after reboots and a slew of permission issues with sym-links to old OS **** the list goes on and on. Granted it was less migration work for my guys but its now other work at the basic OS level and even some customer outliers that I wont even count. I'm not sure if anyone has ever used professional services before but based on this I will never do that again.

We ended up doing the rest ourselves because it was such a show. The more I'm reading in these forums the more I'm realizing its going to be a huge migration effort to something we 100% maintain. I wanted to love the relationship with PLESK and have been using it for years since 2012 or some junk. If PLESK is really just trying to make its investors happy they should let them read these forums. If I was an investor id be plenty pissed off at what the future looks like for PLESK. I even did the survey they sent and it asked to pick the to 5 most important features. Most of them I thought "no one asked for this **** to begin with." It just made me mad to even read some of what was asked because it felt like a group of people managing PLESK who have no idea what it even is. I guess we all should have seen this coming when the platform kept getting sold around to other places.

I appreciate you all telling your stories and what you are using now, I defiantly feel like this will be the end for us using PLESK in the future for sure.

Mentioned already that even support is going downhill.
Anyways. We cut down 40 more licenses this month.

 

[manni]

For me, the real question is, what is an alternative.
I have tried ISPmanager: API etc. is not supporting functionalities I need. I have checked CloudPanel, which is not supporting Alma/Rocky/CentOS (our whole environment is CentOS based).

 

[cptplastic]

For me, the real question is, what is an alternative.
I have tried ISPmanager: API etc. is not supporting functionalities I need. I have checked CloudPanel, which is not supporting Alma/Rocky/CentOS (our whole environment is CentOS based).

I'm not sure about your size but we have been in serious talks with AMAZON LightSail. Its a lift and shift but it would put us in a position to avoid vendor lock-in as you can move things around to other places. Give it a look VPS, web hosting pricing—Amazon Lightsail—Amazon Web Services

 

[trialotto]

AGREE
If they removed the domain limit I think that would be better, not a gamechanger just a nice cost savings. I don't understand the "old-school" license model much these days. I agree that CloudPanel is looking real nice about now. Was cPanel and Plesk owned by the same company at one point?

To be honest, the whole "licensing model" is a bit odd.

It is not about the domain limit - at least, it should not be about that.

In essence, the Plesk Panel that you are paying for should be something like a "full-price-for-a-full-package".

But it is not - the licensing model is a mirror of what has happened with Plesk over the years : crucial services and functionalities have been added in the form of extensions, both free and (mostly) paid for.

It has become a myriad of components and prices and extensions that all add up to a hefty sum to be paid for licenses.

I do not mind the prices, not at all.

I do mind the licensing model, if that licensing model makes you pay (top dollar) for the most basic functionalities (that should be included by default) and (top dollar or a small fee) for those functionalities that are actually obsolete in most circumstances.

Obviously, there are better ways to structure a licensing model that

a - allows Plesk sufficient budget for future development, (and)
b - ascertains that Plesk Panel remains affordable.

As a final remark, the current complexity of Plesk requires price increases in order to sustain future development - so, price stabilization can be realized when certain components are not developed anymore as a "crucial component".

There is a role for the community here - we should not ask for all kinds of services and functionality that most of us do not use : in the long run, we all end up paying for that service/functionality, if and when Plesk decides to introduce it and maintain it actively.

In my humble opinion, that role should also be a (small) part of the discussion concerning "massive" price increases.

We should not ask for Ferrari's, Porsche's, Lamborghini's etc if we cannot afford them ..... and complain afterwards that we cannot afford them.

Long story short : AGREE !

Anyhow, what I really wanted to post. Recently we had a bunch of servers on ubuntu 18.04 and we wanted to go from 18 to 20.04 or the next LTS version. Its a huge pain in the butt to do this, I'm sure all of you know if you ever done this before. We did a couple and got through it - just OK but I made the choice to use professional services and pay to have the rest done cause its a huge time suck and why not just let the PLESK masters do what they do, or so we thought. Well that was a few months ago and let me tell you its been a nightmare.

This is a valid point, to a high degree.

There are some scripts, functionalities and services taking care of the migration processes.

However, it is mind-boggling that there is no (automated) way provided by default with Plesk to simply clone a Plesk instance AND ALL OF ITS SETTINGS AND CONFIGURATION FILES to a new fresh server.

Sure, there is some automation to some extent, but it often fails miserably.

On the other hand, one always has to take into account that the installation of a new fresh server is a time-consuming process ..... the migration of Plesk to the new server is the least of one's worries.

Long story short : it would be nice if cloning of Plesk instances would be seamless and without issues or errors - AGREE !!!!!

PS A small note though - it is fairly easy to create a "small script" to "clone" Plesk instances, but that is also an "accident going to happen" : the script requires constant maintenance and updates in order to allow for cloning with upwards and backwards compatability and/or compatability with other OSes. It is not a huge surprise that such a script is not included by default with Plesk ........ but still, it should be included.

 

[bootted]

For me, the real question is, what is an alternative.
I have tried ISPmanager: API etc. is not supporting functionalities I need. I have checked CloudPanel, which is not supporting Alma/Rocky/CentOS (our whole environment is CentOS based).

I don’t think there’s a 100% equivalent alternative to Plesk. Some "sacrifices" and custom modifications will definitely be necessary. For those managing multiple servers, it’s certainly a costly investment upfront, but in the long term, it pays off, including in terms of control over your server and billing.

When I migrated my servers, it took me one night to align with the functionalities I was using with Plesk. I relied heavily on AI to speed up the entire process. So, it’s challenging but definitely doable.

 

[manni]

Alright, thanks for this information. So you go forward with ISPmanager, right?

Thx
Manuel

 

[trialotto]

@bootted and especially @manni

This statement

I don’t think there’s a 100% equivalent alternative to Plesk.

is about right, but not entirely.


In fact, the most cost effective solution and hence alternative is to (re-)create your own hosting solution with Apache, Nginx, some necessary services and scripts and a GUI for the hosting customers.

Cost effective (and very performant), but not very practical in real life.


The best thing about Plesk is that it is really easy.

This comes at a price, but also with a gain - the gain of not having to maintain all of the packages that you need to install and/or the maintenance of the GUI.

For some sysadmins, there is also the gain of having (a lot of) flexibility, without being bound to the default packages and config provided with Plesk.


In essence, the gain seems to be immaterial by nature, but it is actually also material.

Every day, every Plesk admin saves time by simply using Plesk ....... this is a considerable amount of savings on personnel costs.

One Plesk license per YEAR of - let's say - 1000 euro is the equivalent of one IT staff member working for only 1 or 2 DAYS.

That is a considerable material gain......... and finance matters.


Sure, there are (not so similar) alternatives to Plesk out there.

Nevertheless, the material gain is often not as considerable as it will be with Plesk.

There are two simple reasons for that.

One reason is quite simple - one has to invest time and hence a lot of money into migration to a new panel that might not be so compatible.

The second reason is less straightforward - the hidden higher costs of more maintenance that were not mentioned when they marketed a lower license fee.

Another (third) reason is also present - the best alternatives to Plesk tend to be bought by investors wanting to enter the market or investors already present in the market : in both cases, the investors attempt to consolidate the market ..... and you will probably end up paying Plesk prices.

In general, the cost of a good alternative to Plesk is AT LEAST the price of migration ..... and often much more than that.

I hate to say it, but history has learned us that "alternatives" are a temporary solution, for many reasons.

Needless to say that many people have migrated to other panels, in order to return to Plesk briefly afterwards.


In my humble opinion, it should not be about "migration to other panels" or about "massive price increases".

It should be - amongst others - about how one implements Plesk in a specific infrastructure.

With the right infrastructure, a lot of monetary gains can be realized that can offset the price increases, whilst at the same time increasing performance.


Naturally, IF there is a valid alternative to Plesk, then please let me know - I tend to test these alternatives, just for the sake of fun.


Kind regards.....

 

[manni]

Hello Triallotto,

to add to your statement here I would give Windows & alternative OS as an example. For a standard user, there is simply no alternative solution. People use Offcie/Outlook/Word since years, at least our customers would NEVER go away from it. The question what I have is, why WebPros just cancelled all partner contracts and why they do not look for discussion with the communication to resolve the situation.

cheers
Manuel