• Hi, Pleskians! We are running a UX testing of our upcoming product intended for server management and monitoring.
    We would like to invite you to have a call with us and have some fun checking our prototype. The agenda is pretty simple - we bring new design and some scenarios that you need to walk through and succeed. We will be watching and taking insights for further development of the design.
    If you would like to participate, please use this link to book a meeting. We will sent the link to the clickable prototype at the meeting.
  • (Plesk for Windows):
    MySQL Connector/ODBC 3.51, 5.1, and 5.3 are no longer shipped with Plesk because they have reached end of life. MariaDB Connector/ODBC 64-bit 3.2.4 is now used instead.
  • The Horde webmail has been deprecated. Its complete removal is scheduled for April 2025. For details and recommended actions, see the Feature and Deprecation Plan.

Input Enormous price increases yet again for 2025

Reading all of this saddens me as I just started using this platform.
Now I wonder if I made a mistake. lol
I mean, what is another alternative? Open source or otherwise?
No, there are just some individuals who have complained about Plesk pricing for years on this forum and other places. Plesk is the Porsche 911 among control panels. If you want to drive a Lada Riva or a Dacia 1310 instead of the Porsche 911 then Plesk is not for you. But if you want to be on a top notch panel, stay with Plesk. The problem with pricing is that it started out too low many years ago when Plesk upgraded from the 11.x and 12.x versions to Plesk Onyx and then Obsidian. That was a major technology advancement, but many users want to pay the Lada or Dacia price still as they had many years ago for the Porsche that they get these days.
 
Reading all of this saddens me as I just started using this platform.

Now I wonder if I made a mistake. lol

I mean, what is another alternative? Open source or otherwise?

Hi fvs047, as you can see there are different voices here. I partly agree with the comment from @Bitpalast but I really think the question depends on what your needs are. So I want to give you some insights in the experience that I've made in the last years and how I see the things. And yes, this is a personal experience, I don't want to talk negative or positive but super neutral.

Plesk is a Hosting Management Panel, making System Administrator's live easier. This means, that Plesk is a piece of software that will generate configuration for other tools. This means, that it can help saving your time, but it will not replace a system administrator. You will need knowledge about system administration, especially about hardening as Plesk won't take care about it. E.g. is firewalling: Plesk gives you an interface to manage your iptables rules, but it is your job to maintain/activate/understand the rules.

Now coming to Plesk and/or it's competitors, independent whether they are Open Source, cheaper, more expensive, whatever. I personally think, that a monthly license fee of ~ € 40,- for a unlimited license is fair for a server. If you have plenty of servers, like we have, this might drive the price up, right? So suddenly cost saving thoughts might come up to the table. E.g. a 10% increase is not much, but if you e.g. have license costs for € 4.000,- the € 400,- might hurt you. But this is not a problem only to Plesk, it's the same with e.g. Microsoft. We have a lot of customers migrating out of Microsoft 365, because the total license fees are not payable by them anymore.

Now, I want to give you a very personal insight, why for example I was complaining here:
  1. Hosting is not our main business, but we host a few thousand domains. Most customers use old technology, because they are not willing to adopt solutions because they work. This leads us into the situation, that 50-70% of our customers use PHP 5.3 (or older!)

    Is it a bad situation? Yes!
    Can we force the customer to change? No!
    So what should we do, if we see no light to migrate? We can't do anything except closing down the business.

  2. 3% of our customers use the self service platform = login to plesk and maintain it. Most of them are not interested.
    It is the same with WordPress: Out of 700 WordPress installations, only 3 (!) people used their login in the last 2 years.

  3. We do not sell anything like subdomains etc; it is always 1 domain = 1 hosting package = 1 account!
So for us, everything that Plesk does, is creating Apache/Nginx configuration, creating mailserver configuration and MySQL configuration. Honestly said, for generating 3-4 configuration files, the solution is just an overshoot. We ignored it, because it was a nice-to-have that was effordable; but we are not willing to pay e.g. € 500,- per server to do so, as we can also handle it easily via Bash Scripts.

In regards to Support I can tell you, that the Support Team as well as the community admins always did a great job and there is nothing I can complain. In case you get a little bit bigger, the situation becomes strange. We tried several times to achieve an partner status, at least to discuss the situation without any luck. The only feedback we got is, that no new partners are accepted, and that new license changes will come soon.

The big bad point is, that it is simply not possible anymore to plan the future with Plesk. We are required to make contracts with our customers over 3-4 years. Yes, some guys might now say, that this is stupid, but we have for example also "officials" (e.g. schools) as customers and the government requires them to do a long-term contract with best price guarantee. Now for domains this is easy, we just immediatly add the years to it. But how should we handle Plesk inceases? And yes, we had strange topics here: We consume our licenses through 4-5 different partners, some of them are smaller, some of them are most likely some of the biggest ones. And the situation is crazy: E.g. one kicked all licenses simply out, referring to Plesks changes. Another partner just started to increase the license. And then the strange things come: Out of 10 licenses we have in total 7 different prices.

But again, this is not complaining. Plesk is a great tool, until you use it. We don't use the features because our customers are simply not interested. And the mass hosting market is down: We don't want to, and honestly we are not able to go into a competition where 400GB HA-webspace, 8GB dedicated RAM and 6 dedicated vCUPs including unlimited domains and Plesk cost you € 15,- total a month.

So, long story short: Give it a try, make use of all the features & benefits and enjoy Plesk. It's for sure the best solution if you compare it in regards it to features.
 
No, there are just some individuals who have complained about Plesk pricing for years on this forum and other places. Plesk is the Porsche 911 among control panels. If you want to drive a Lada Riva or a Dacia 1310 instead of the Porsche 911 then Plesk is not for you. But if you want to be on a top notch panel, stay with Plesk. The problem with pricing is that it started out too low many years ago when Plesk upgraded from the 11.x and 12.x versions to Plesk Onyx and then Obsidian. That was a major technology advancement, but many users want to pay the Lada or Dacia price still as they had many years ago for the Porsche that they get these days.
Just take a look at Reddit or other forums where people are complaining about Plesk and cPanel for their incomprehensible price hikes. I agree with you on the Porsche 911 example. Plesk is the most advanced system for managing a website today. But now it no longer makes sense to pay $500 a year to remain tied to a platform that already worked well when it cost less than half that.

To revisit your analogy, I took the chassis of a 911 with CloudPanel (for free) and then added the seats, steering wheel, and wheels using Claude and DeepSeek, also learning how to manage a server in the process. And many hosting providers are also thinking of doing the same, as they are tired of their customers' complaints, as if the providers themselves were responsible for the price increases.

Plesk is slowly eroding the trust of its customers, and you'll see it over time.
 
Just take a look at Reddit or other forums where people are complaining about Plesk and cPanel for their incomprehensible price hikes. I agree with you on the Porsche 911 example. Plesk is the most advanced system for managing a website today. But now it no longer makes sense to pay $500 a year to remain tied to a platform that already worked well when it cost less than half that.

To revisit your analogy, I took the chassis of a 911 with CloudPanel (for free) and then added the seats, steering wheel, and wheels using Claude and DeepSeek, also learning how to manage a server in the process. And many hosting providers are also thinking of doing the same, as they are tired of their customers' complaints, as if the providers themselves were responsible for the price increases.

Plesk is slowly eroding the trust of its customers, and you'll see it over time.
Excellent reply Gary W. (again)!
 
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