I dont think licenses from datacenters will be affected since they buy thousands of licenses in millions. Parallels would not dare to raise prices to big hosting companies or datacenters since they actually decide what the market uses. They would just unplug the plug for plesk and millons of clients would stop using Plesk in a major draw back for the company. So no they will not raise prices to datacenters as far as i see it. Its simple, if they do people will not choose plesk anymore but Cpanel. Simple.
Actually i think the removing of prices if just because most people dont buy directly from Parralles, they do it from datacenters and resellers where you can get the leased license cheaper. What Parrallels is trying to do is to make people lease licenses not to own them.
Owning a license is just 1 big earning against leasing which is a recurring fee forever.
This way people would not buy licenses but lease them. And most do lease via datacenters. I still think this not a nice move of Paralles.
We wanted to buy 10x 100 domain licenses upfront so we could save a little instead of leasing.
I now and most people will agree that most business don't want to lease things for a long period of time. It increases your cost and your final prices. That means if you have a heavy capital of $$$ to invest its actually pretty dumm to buy the licenses, its cheaper to lease them. his is the model Paralles wants to bring into the market. Software as a Service.
But if they dont want people to buy directly anymore they should just remove the store and put a link to resellers or partners. Removing the options and force people to lease is not a smart move. I always read many magazines where the CEO of Parrallels puts all his bets to Software as a Service. So yes, they want people to pay each month instead of owning the licenses. I bet you that they will eventually remove the owned license and you will not be able to buy Plesk anymore but just to lease it.
They do this on HSPcomplete for example. You cannot own it. The trick you to so you think you own, you get a license and all but then you have to pay a maintaince fee every month and that is just the same as leasing. People are not stupid anyway. A hosting company cannot lease all of their softwares, if they would then they would not earn anything. Even said all this.....
I don't have a problem with this model if Plesk would rock and it would be so powerfull and full of features that people would beg you to sell them hosting with Plesk or people would only try to buy Plesk hostings. If this was true, then yes, most people would be still be happy to pay a big lease fee to plesk since, hey, its making you earn more money. Sadly this is not the real world. People still prefer Cpanel, Plesk is spammed everywhere, you have count how many times a link to swsoft.com and the name SW Soft appears on Plesk? Its everywhere. Also Plesk is horrible with support, you have to pay extra if you lease from a datacenter, not to mention that is doesnt bring anything new to the table. Most open source panels have the same features and most of paid panels have even more and better features then plesk. So this is what i blame plesk for. If they want to try to sell it as a service then they should give first class support for the money you pay, they should fix upgrades, fix bugs fast, and put new feautures that not a single panel has and the developing should be fast. Putting software as a service can work but not how they do it. If people pay each month money they expect something for it. Nobody wants to pay each month and dont see anything new, not be able to request support, use a panel full of spam, full of bugs (They still after 2 years did not fixed a MySQL database problem when you migrate sites from Plesk to Plesk panels, which plesk corrupts accents), not to hear your clients (2 years, this is the 3 year we dont see Postfix not ClamAV).
So you would have to be crazy to pay each month for something that is old, buggy, take forever to implement new technology and is with spam everywhere of Sw Soft.
This is just putting a pistol against your head, because you increase your costs for what? For something you can get for Free in other softwares. How can a free software be better then a lease panel that costs 69$ a month directly from Parrallels?
I know exactly the problem Parrallels is experimenting. They have grown so fast and are so big that vanity claimed into their heads. They think Plesk is the 1 number panel, that people die for it, and no matter what people will use it, just like Microsoft. They have copied the mode exactly. Expect that Microsoft gives you tons of paid things for free in the OS they release and plesk just give you open source software and free things. Microsoft clones a software and its in the next release, SW Soft implents the free version, buggy and decides peopl have to pay extra for it. Microsoft releases new features with time, plesk cannot even put basic things like a good interface to the anti spam filter.
Microsoft only makes you pay 1 time and then you have fixes and updates for free. Sw Soft makes you pay a leases license and then makes you pay for every addon, module or support extra. Microsoft is the OS that most people have into their computers, they only have Linux as competition, people that play games use Windows. Plesk is not the only one in the server world. They are hundreds of paid and free control panels. Most people hate Plesk because of the image they give with all their branding in the panel. Just talk in hosting forums, most people are cpanel lovers, most of my customers ask me to sell them cpanel and i only have plesk. So they are not the first panel in the industry. People want choices and Plesk is exactly the opposite. You are forced to their looks and their feautures, most thing you need to heavily mod the panel to make it work, so its terrible.
If Plesk doesnt come with a very big improvement on Plesk 9 or the new release my company will drop Plesk for good. If the new versions are just stupid bug fixes and affiliated links and paid services i have to buy extra for each single server then they can forget me. Im so loyal to this company that doesnt give me anything back. I dont even offer services with products that are not from Plesk. I only did this because i started with Plesk when it was still from the german company which where 100 times better then Sw Soft. Most new releases are really a joke. They put a new release to fix 10 bugs and in the windows version you see 50 new features on every release.
I remember someone said to me that maybe because plesk was so stable and it was so good that it did not needed any new features of releases. Juaz.
You want to me to put a list? I could write 10 word pages of just basics things that plesk doesnt do and other panels do like letting you choose the order the server loads indexes. Like index.htm, index.php or even let you configure which one to use. That is so basic and it doesnt so. Hotlinking? Well Cpanel has that since ages. I know you can do most things but without plesk so whats the use for if i have to do eveything manually. Then i just good without plesk. Remote MySQL option.
Postfix, ClamAv, etc, etc, etc.