cPanel Price Increase 2027: New Prices From 16 December and 3 Free Panels That Import Your Accounts

The cPanel price increase for 2027 starts on 16 December 2026 and raises every cPanel Store license by 8.3 to 10%, including licenses you already pay for. Solo goes from $29.99 to $32.99 a month, Admin from $35.99 to $38.99, Pro from $53.99 to $58.99 and Premier from $69.99 to $76.99. Plesk and WHMCS follow on 1 January 2027.

If your VPS carries cPanel mainly so that you and a few clients can manage sites and mailboxes, you have about eight weeks to move those accounts to a free panel and cancel the license before it renews. HestiaCP, CyberPanel and Virtualmin can import cPanel's own backup file; CloudPanel and aaPanel need a manual move. If you need the destination server, our VPS hosting plans run on KVM in Amsterdam, Dublin and Prishtina.

Key facts, checked on 2026-10-18:

• cPanel's 2027 pricing FAQ says the new prices apply to all new orders and to existing accounts, subscriptions and services that begin on 16 December 2026 (cPanel 2027 pricing FAQs).
• The cPanel Store Licensing Guide 2027, valid from 16 December 2026, lists Pro (up to 30 accounts) at $58.99 and Premier (up to 100) at $76.99 a month, plus $0.55 per account above 100 (cPanel licensing guide). The current cPanel pricing page still shows $53.99 and $69.99 for those tiers, VAT excluded.
• From 1 January 2027 Plesk Web Admin costs $18.99 (€15.99), Web Pro $33.99 (€28.99) and Web Host $73.99 (€62.99) a month, the same on VPS and dedicated servers (Plesk licensing guide 2027).
• WHMCS Plus rises from $34.95 to $39.99 a month and Professional from $54.95 to $62.99 on 1 January 2027 (WHMCS licensing guide 2027).

cPanel price increase 2027: old and new price per tier

A cPanel license is a monthly subscription per server, and its tier sets how many cPanel accounts that server may hold. An account is one cPanel login, usually one client, and it can hold several domains. A VPS needs a Cloud license, cPanel's license type for virtual servers, sold in all four tiers. The Metal license for physical servers is listed only as Premier, at the same $76.99. Store prices per month, without VAT:

Paid yearly, the 2027 guide charges 11 times the monthly price: $362.89 for Solo, $428.89 for Admin and $648.89 for Pro, with no yearly price listed for Premier. An agency with 25 client accounts on Pro pays $707.88 a year on monthly billing, for the license alone. A host with 300 accounts on Premier goes from $167.99 to $186.99 a month.

These are cPanel Store prices. A license that comes with your server from a hosting provider follows that provider's price list. The trade site webhosting.today puts the Solo license at $15 a month in 2019 (5 October 2026), so Solo in 2027 costs 2.2 times its 2019 price. cPanel's FAQ says further adjustments may follow.

The extra fee for servers still on CentOS 7

Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) is cPanel's paid program for servers that still run CentOS 7 or CloudLinux 7 with cPanel version 110. During 2027 it adds $9.90 a month per server on Solo, $11.70 on Admin, $17.70 on Pro and $23.10 on Premier, according to the cPanel Store Licensing Guide 2027, so a CentOS 7 server on Pro pays $76.69 a month. The fee stops once the server runs a supported system, and that rebuild is the cheapest moment to drop cPanel too.

Plesk and WHMCS rise on 1 January 2027

Plesk belongs to WebPros, the company that also owns cPanel, and rises in the same season: webhosting.today puts the increase on a VPS at 11.8 to 17.5% (8 October 2026). Plesk counts domains rather than accounts. So 30 client sites that each need their own login cost $58.99 a month on cPanel Pro but $33.99 on Plesk Web Pro, which allows 30 domains.

WHMCS, the billing system many small hosts run next to cPanel, raises Plus from $34.95 to $39.99 a month (14.4%) and Professional from $54.95 to $62.99 (14.6%). The old prices are on its current pricing page, the new ones in the 2027 licensing guide. Leaving cPanel doesn't change that bill.

Is cPanel still worth paying for after the 2027 increase?

A control panel is the web page where you add sites, databases, mailboxes and DNS records without typing commands. A free panel does the same daily jobs without a license fee: sites, databases, mail, DNS and Let's Encrypt certificates. You pay with your own time instead, because you apply updates and search the forum when something breaks.

Stay on cPanel if you resell hosting to customers who expect cPanel logins, if you rely on the reseller tools in WHM (cPanel's server-wide admin side), or if you run close to 100 accounts per server, where Premier works out to about 77 cents per account.

Leave if the server hosts one to thirty accounts you manage yourself. For that group the license costs $395.88 to $707.88 a year from December and buys no extra speed.

Two cases need no full panel. One WordPress site with mail elsewhere can run without one; see our guide to moving WordPress to a VPS. To leave the one-server model completely, read what replaces cPanel in a Kubernetes stack. In every other case, the only fixed cost left after the move is the server itself. If that server's own price went up this year, our guides to the Hetzner price increase and the netcup price increase cover the switch. The plan table below sizes it for each panel, and all VPS plans are listed on one page.

Which free cPanel alternatives can import a cPanel backup?

A cPanel full backup is one .tar.gz archive that holds the home directory, database dumps, mail, DNS zone files and settings. An importer is a script on the new panel that unpacks this archive and rebuilds the account.

The panels' documentation says little about what their importers restore, so on 18 October 2026 we read the source code of HestiaCP 1.10.5, CyberPanel 3.0.7 (stable branch) and Virtualmin 8.3.0, the releases current on that day. In short: Virtualmin's importer moves the most, HestiaCP leaves SSL, DKIM and most DNS records to you, and CyberPanel sits between the two. For RAM use and day-to-day handling of each panel, see our tested comparison of free VPS control panels.

Which VPS plan and city to choose after leaving cPanel

The panel sets the memory floor. HestiaCP needs 1 GB without its spam and virus filters, CloudPanel at least 2 GB, and Virtualmin with its virus scanner used about 1.8 GB at idle in our October 2026 panel test.

VPS plans have shared vCPUs, meaning processor cores shared with other customers; VDS plans have dedicated vCPUs reserved for you (our VPS, VDS and dedicated server comparison explains the difference). Every plan has NVMe storage, unmetered traffic and its own IPv4 and IPv6 address, and you can upgrade later from the client area with a short reboot.

Then pick the city nearest the sites' visitors. The millisecond figures are our own ping.pe measurements to our servers on 6 October 2026, published on our location pages; the Skopje figure is measured on our own network.

Availability by city is on the VPS plans page. If you would rather have the move done for you, we quote setup work per job via Telegram or email.

How to download a full cPanel backup

In cPanel, open Files, then Backup, and choose Download a Full Account Backup. Pick Home Directory, a remote FTP server or Secure Copy (SCP) to send it straight to the new server, then click Generate Backup. cPanel's backup docs warn that hosts can switch the feature off and that an account near its disk quota may fail to back up. The file is named after the date and user, such as backup-10.18.2026_09-16-55_alice.tar.gz.

With root access to WHM, the pkgacct script packs any account:

# as root on the old cPanel server (from cPanel's pkgacct documentation)
mkdir -p /home/migrate
/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/pkgacct alice /home/migrate
ls -lh /home/migrate
scp /home/migrate/cpmove-alice.tar.gz root@203.0.113.10:/root/

Replace alice with the cPanel username and 203.0.113.10 with the new server's IP. ls shows the exact archive name, usually cpmove-alice.tar.gz. The import steps below start from that file in /root on the new server; if you made the backup in cPanel instead, put your backup-...tar.gz name in their place.

How to import a cPanel backup into HestiaCP, CyberPanel or Virtualmin

We did not run these imports for this article. The commands below come from each project's documentation, so import one small account first and check it before moving the rest.

HestiaCP: v-import-cpanel

The cPanel username must not exist on the Hestia server yet, and the packages rsync and file must be installed. The script unpacks into a temporary folder under /backup, so the disk briefly holds the archive, an unpacked copy and the final files. Leave free space of roughly three times the account's size. The script also rewrites the MySQL 8 collation utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci to utf8mb4_unicode_ci so MariaDB accepts the dumps.

# as root on the new HestiaCP server (from the HestiaCP CLI reference and the script's own error message)
apt-get install -y rsync file
mv /root/cpmove-alice.tar.gz /backup/
v-import-cpanel /backup/cpmove-alice.tar.gz

If the domain's mail stays with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, add yes as a second argument so the script keeps the MX records from the cPanel zone. The HestiaCP CLI reference shows the same syntax. The header of the script itself lists two known issues: certificate import fails, and DKIM is not updated.

CyberPanel: cPanelImporter.py

The importer, in CyberPanel since version 1.8.5 according to its knowledge base, takes a folder and imports every .tar.gz archive in it. It rebuilds the DNS zone record by record and skips DKIM, which you then add in CyberPanel's DKIM manager.

# as root on the new CyberPanel server (command from CyberPanel's knowledge base)
mkdir -p /home/backup
mv /root/cpmove-alice.tar.gz /home/backup/
/usr/local/CyberCP/bin/python /usr/local/CyberCP/plogical/cPanelImporter.py --path /home/backup

The first output line names the log file under /home/cyberpanel/; search it for Failed. CyberPanel serves sites with OpenLiteSpeed instead of Apache, so test sites that rely on .htaccess rules with extra care.

Virtualmin: migrate-domain

Use Add Servers, then Migrate Virtual Server in the web interface, or the command line, which avoids browser upload limits for big archives:

# as root on the new Virtualmin server (options from the Virtualmin CLI documentation)
virtualmin migrate-domain --source /root/cpmove-alice.tar.gz --type cpanel --domain example.com --pass 'choose-a-new-password' --webmin

The migrate-domain documentation lists more options, such as --ip for accounts that had their own IP.

CloudPanel and aaPanel: by hand

CloudPanel's PHP site migration guide copies the files, dumps the database with mysqldump and imports it with clpctl db:import. aaPanel works the same way: create each site and database, then copy files and import the dump. Both suit a few websites whose mail lives elsewhere, for example on a separate self-hosted mailcow mail server.

What does not move when you migrate cPanel to a free panel

• SSL certificates on HestiaCP. Issue new Let's Encrypt certificates after the switch: the usual HTTP-01 check fetches a file from your domain over port 80 (Let's Encrypt), so it only works once the domain points at the new IP.
• DKIM, the signature that proves mail came from your domain. The new server signs with a new key, so publish the DNS record the panel shows you. Also add the new server's IPv4 and IPv6 to SPF, the DNS record that lists which servers may send your mail, or mail lands in spam.
• DNS records outside HestiaCP's template, such as verification TXT records and Microsoft 365 CNAMEs. Every old zone is in the backup's dnszones folder; compare it line by line.
• Forwarders, autoresponders, mail filters and FTP accounts on HestiaCP and CyberPanel. Recreate them by hand.
• PostgreSQL databases. None of the three importers restores them; use pg_dump and psql.
• Softaculous and WordPress Toolkit. The app files move, their update and staging features don't.
• Cron jobs that call cPanel paths such as /usr/local/bin/ea-php81. HestiaCP rewrites them; elsewhere, check each job.

Cutover plan: switch DNS without losing mail

A and AAAA records point your domain to an IPv4 and an IPv6 address; the MX record names the server that receives your mail.

1. Two days ahead, lower the TTL (time to live: how many seconds other DNS servers may cache an answer) to 300 on the A, AAAA and MX records, at whoever hosts your DNS today.
2. Install the panel on a fresh Debian or Ubuntu server and lock it down with our Debian 13 security guide. On RS Computers servers, outbound port 25 (the port mail servers use to deliver to each other) is blocked on new servers and opened on request through Telegram, and you set reverse DNS (PTR) in the client area or through Telegram.
3. Import one account as a trial and test it as shown in the next section.
4. In a quiet hour, freeze changes, delete the trial account, make a fresh backup and import it again. For small accounts that is safer than syncing only what changed.
5. Change the A and AAAA records, and MX if mail moves. Move nameservers later, if at all, because their TTL sits with the domain's registry and you cannot lower it.
6. Issue Let's Encrypt certificates once the domain resolves to the new IP.
7. Keep the old server for about a week and check its webmail for late deliveries. Then cancel the cPanel license before its next renewal: in the cPanel Store, open Orders/Licenses, then View My Licenses, click Active next to the license and choose Request Cancellation, or ask your provider. A store license cancelled more than 72 hours after purchase stays active until the end of the month (cPanel docs).

How to test the new server before you change DNS

Your hosts file tells only your computer where a domain lives, so you can open the moved sites while everyone else still sees the old server. Add one line, new IP first:

# on your own computer, as Administrator (Windows) or with sudo (macOS, Linux)
# Windows file: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts   macOS and Linux: sudo nano /etc/hosts
203.0.113.10  example.com www.example.com

Restart the browser and click through forms, logins, the shop checkout and webmail. A certificate warning is normal until the new certificate exists. Remove the line afterwards.

From a terminal, dig prints the current TTL in seconds after the name, and curl --resolve asks the new server for a page without editing anything (see the curl manual). These are standard checks that we did not run for this article, so put in your own domain and IP:

# as a normal user on your own computer (Linux, macOS, or Windows with WSL); options from the dig and curl manuals
dig +noall +answer example.com A
curl -sI --resolve example.com:80:203.0.113.10 http://example.com/

curl should answer HTTP/1.1 200 OK or a 301 redirect to HTTPS. A 404 or the panel's default page means the domain or its files didn't land where they should. If dig shows 14400, resolvers may keep the old address for up to four hours.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a cPanel license cost on a VPS in 2027?

From 16 December 2026 a cPanel Cloud license for a VPS costs $32.99 a month for Solo (1 account), $38.99 for Admin (up to 5), $58.99 for Pro (up to 30) and $76.99 for Premier (up to 100), plus $0.55 per account above 100, according to the cPanel Store Licensing Guide 2027. That is 8.3 to 10% more than the 2026 prices of $29.99, $35.99, $53.99 and $69.99. Prices exclude VAT.

Does the cPanel 2027 price increase apply to existing licenses?

Yes. cPanel's 2027 pricing FAQ applies the new prices to new orders and to existing subscriptions and services that begin on 16 December 2026, so your first renewal on or after that date is billed at the new rate. Licenses bought through a hosting provider follow that provider's price list.

Is Plesk cheaper than cPanel after the 2027 price increase?

For small servers, usually. From 1 January 2027 Plesk Web Admin costs $18.99 a month for 10 domains and Web Pro $33.99 for 30, against $38.99 for cPanel Admin with 5 accounts and $58.99 for cPanel Pro with 30. Both are WebPros products, and both raise prices for 2027.

What is the best free alternative to cPanel?

For a VPS that hosts several clients with mail, HestiaCP is the closest free match. It used about 590 MB of RAM at idle in our free panel test, with its spam and virus filters off, and its v-import-cpanel command restores files, MySQL databases, mailboxes with passwords and cron jobs from a cPanel backup. Virtualmin imports more but used about 1.8 GB. CloudPanel suits websites without mail.

Will email keep working after leaving cPanel?

Yes, if you prepare. HestiaCP, CyberPanel and Virtualmin copy mailboxes and password hashes, so users keep their passwords. You still need a new DKIM record, the new IPs in SPF, reverse DNS (PTR, the record that maps your server's IP back to its hostname), outbound port 25 open and the MX record switched while the TTL is short.

How do I move from cPanel to HestiaCP?

Make a full account backup in cPanel, copy the .tar.gz archive to /backup on the HestiaCP server and run v-import-cpanel with the archive's path as root. Test the sites through your hosts file, lower the DNS TTL to 300 seconds two days ahead, then switch the A and AAAA records (and MX if mail moves) and issue new Let's Encrypt certificates.

Cancel before the renewal, not after

The new cPanel prices arrive with your first renewal on or after 16 December, so each license's renewal date is your real deadline. Import one account into a free panel this week, test it through your hosts file, then move the rest. For the new server, see our VPS hosting plans in Amsterdam, Dublin and Prishtina, or ask us on Telegram which plan fits your accounts and mailboxes.

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