We’ve always prided ourselves in affordable, offering hosting from just $1/month, backed by WordPress experts and without compromising on performance. While we’d like to do that indefinitely, it’s evident with the ever-increasing licensing pricing that it’s simply not possible or reasonable.
For background:
On September 29th, 2021, cPanel, which provides the web hosting panel for our shared hosting plans, announced a price increase for all users, impacting prices across the board by 10-15% for everyone. This was not the first time this happened — last year, cPanel announced a similar increase — and will not be the last, as cPanel and WebPros have made clear that they will continue to re-evaluate pricing on an annual basis.
We don’t completely blame them. Run-costs have inevitably increased and it certainly wouldn’t be reasonable to expect the same pricing across many years.
In 2020, we simply absorbed the cost and kept pricing the same. While we could do the same this year, it doesn’t make sense for us to retain the same pricing indefinitely either.
Therefore, effective October 1st, 2021, today, we are announcing pricing changes for new orders on the following plans:
| Plan Name | Old Price | New Price |
| Basic | $1/m | $1.75/m |
| Elite | $2.49/m | $2.99/m |
| Unlimited | $4.49/m | $4.99/m |
| Power | $7.99/m | $8.99/m |
For our reseller plans:
| Plan Name | Old Price | New Price |
| Standard | $11.95/m | $15.95/m |
| Plus | $19.95/m | $23.95/m |
| Premium | $34.95/m | $40.95/m |
| Enterprise | $69.95/m | $79.95/m |
These pricing changes will only apply to new orders. Existing clients are not affected, and pricing will remain the same. Upgrades/Downgrades, however, will result in plans being adjusted to the new price.
For existing clients, we are providing a 14 day grace period to upgrade/downgrade existing plans to another plan with the old pricing, as a courtesy.
This pricing change was made in consideration of a variety of factors, besides just licensing costs. Beyond just running a sustainable business, we want to invest in state-of-the-art technology and development, and build cool things. We also want to ensure we have sufficient buffers to absorb highly probable future licensing changes without needing to announce pricing changes annually.
We understand that this may be a cause of frustration for many site owners and businesses. We recommend reaching out to our support team at support@cynderhost.com if these changes pose a significant financial burden. We are committed to supporting you and your business every step of the way.
Below are answers to common questions:
Does this impact my current hosting subscription?
No, this pricing change will only apply to new orders and upgrades/downgrades.
Are there any other non-pricing changes to my hosting plans?
We will not be changing the limits, resources, or features on any hosting plan, except for the addition of WordPress Toolkit Deluxe for all plans, which provides streamlined WordPress hardening, management, and snapshots.
You can find this new option in cPanel, under Domains.
We will, however, be offering more robust backup retention for all accounts free of charge.
Our money-back period for all plans has also been extended from 7 days to 30 days to allow for better evaluation.
Will pricing for current subscriptions increase in the future?
We have no plans to increase or change the pricing for current subscriptions. We value stability and consistency, and we don’t like price hikes too. It’s impossible to predict what the future holds, so while we cannot promise you with 100% certainty that pricing will remain the same indefinitely, we’ll aim for that 99%.
Why not absorb the cost?
Money that is put elsewhere must be taken from somewhere. While we could have simply absorbed the cost with little noticeably impact to current customers, we put our core values above all. That is to be:
Fast. Reliable. Affordable
We don’t feel that the price changes greatly impede our affordability. At the same time, it ensures we can continue to invest money in new technology and development, as well as expand our offerings to continue to provide fast and reliable services that you and your business can depend on for many years to come.
Given a choice between cheap, but sub-par service and support, and stellar service and support, but higher pricing, we would choose the latter every time, though that’s not necessarily what the decision comes down to.
What alternatives did you consider?
We considered a wide range of options that wouldn’t have involved pricing changes, the two options were primarily:
Absorbing the cost: See above
Utilizing a new/custom panel: While we thoroughly consider this option and evaluated several potential contenders, this was ultimately a non-viable choice. There are several challenges to such a change that, based on our evaluation, a majority of users would have preferred a small price increase over needing to update their site/code and/or re-learn the interface.
The nature of these control panels and hosting platforms are proprietary, and each one utilizes its own stack, configuration, and way of doing things. Besides a massive user interface change that would likely have caused quite a bit of confusion, there would also be potential errors, due to folder structure/configuration mismatch. The time-cost for our users of needing to re-learn how to navigate and use the panel and ensure everything is working would have outweighed any price change in almost all cases.
Does this mean your prices are unsustainable?
We understand that sustainability is a major concern for many users. We do a variety of things that allow us to provide highly accessible pricing, from partnering with large cPanel licensing partners to cut, to developing software in-house when possible, to cutting costs to near-zero when it comes to things like affiliate payouts. This allows to offer shared hosting at such prices while remaining sustainable, without service quality compromises.
With the new licensing changes from cPanel, the current pricing would have remained sustainable and profitable, as it has from the very start. However, sooner or later, a price adjustment on our side would have been necessary, as we want to remain reasonably profitable as we account for increases in upstream costs.
We could, as many others do, simply charge significantly higher prices from the start, which would provide a significant buffer to eat up upstream pricing changes. However, that would also mean users are paying extra from the start, which is even less preferable.
Will this become a regular thing?
We have no intention or desire to make pricing changes a regular occurrence. At the same time, there are far too many factors at play that will change with time, preventing us from extrapolating what the future will hold years in advance.
Therefore, we cannot make any guarantee that there will be absolutely no more pricing changes in the future, though we will certainly try.
Provider XYZ also use cPanel, but weren’t impacted!
All cPanel licensees and clients were impacted, regardless of license volume, though certain contract provisions may delay the change. While we do not know precisely how cPanel licensing changes were handled by other providers, some charging higher-end prices may have opted to absorb the cost, while others may simply have announced pricing changes in previous years that account for this.
This pricing change was also not solely based on increased cPanel licensing costs, rather, an extensive evaluation of the entire market, potential upstream changes, and inflation, among other factors.
Does this impact your high performance hosting?
No. This annoucement does not impact any products not mentioned in the tables above.
I don’t like these changes. I’m cancelling and moving elsewhere!
We sincerely regret to hear this. We highly recommend expressing your concerns and questions to our support team prior to making any changes or decisions. We truly do care about your business and are highly, highly receptive to any feedback our concerns you may have.
If you would still like to proceed with cancellation, you can submit a cancellation request for the subscription from your client area, after you have successfully migrated your data away.
There are a wide range of options to export your data, including via backups, database dumps, and FTP.
We’d like to stress that this pricing change does not affect current subscriptions.
I have a question/issue about these changes!
Feel free to reach out to our support team at any time and we are happy to provide clarification, answers, and maybe something more.