A licensing change at one software vendor reshaped budget hosting, pushed several hosts onto their own panels, and is the reason your host may have moved your cheese.
For two decades cPanel was simply what web hosting looked like. Then, in 2019, its owners — by then a private equity firm — replaced flat per-server licensing with per-account pricing. A host running a thousand sites on one machine went from paying tens of dollars a month to hundreds, and the increases continued annually thereafter.
If you have wondered why your host migrated you to an unfamiliar control panel, or why £2.99 hosting got worse, this is a large part of the answer.
What it did to the market
Budget shared hosting runs on thin margins. A per-account licence fee of even a dollar or two is significant when the customer pays three. Hosts had three options: absorb it, pass it on, or leave.
- Absorb it — squeeze density and support instead. This is the least visible response and the most common.
- Pass it on — several hosts introduced explicit "control panel" line items or raised renewal pricing.
- Leave — build or adopt a different panel. SiteGround moved to its own Site Tools, Hostinger to hPanel, 20i to My20i, WordPress-specialist hosts to bespoke dashboards.
The third response is why "does it have cPanel?" has become a real question again rather than an assumption.
The alternatives, honestly assessed
| Panel | Cost to the host | What it is like |
|---|---|---|
| cPanel/WHM | Per-account, rising annually | The default; enormous documentation, every tutorial assumes it, universal backup format |
| Plesk | Per-server tiers | The main commercial rival; better on Windows, strong WordPress Toolkit |
| DirectAdmin | Much cheaper per server | Lean, fast, widely adopted by budget hosts post-2019 |
| CyberPanel | Free (OpenLiteSpeed) | Fast stack, rougher edges, popular with small hosts |
| HestiaCP / CloudPanel | Free, open source | Good for a self-managed VPS; not aimed at multi-tenant hosting |
| In-house panels | Development time | Site Tools, hPanel, My20i — tailored, but nothing transfers |
Why this matters to you, not just to your host
Portability. The genuinely useful thing about cPanel was never the interface — it was that a cPanel full backup imports cleanly into any other cPanel host. That is a real exit route, and it is the thing custom panels quietly remove. Site Tools and hPanel both let you export your data; neither produces an archive another host can simply restore.
Documentation. Every tutorial, every plugin support article, every "ask your host to enable X" instruction assumes cPanel. On a bespoke panel you are reliant on that host's own documentation, which is generally thinner.
It is not all downside. Purpose-built panels are usually faster, cleaner and less cluttered with 1998-era features nobody uses. My20i is better than cPanel at managing forty client sites. hPanel is far friendlier for a beginner. cPanel's interface has accumulated three decades of sediment.
Which UK hosts still use cPanel
Krystal, WHUK, eUKhost, Pickaweb, Freethought and A2 among others remain on cPanel. 20i, SiteGround and Hostinger have their own. Cloudways and the managed WordPress hosts never used it.
None of this should be the deciding factor. It is worth one question at signup — if I leave, what format do I get my site in? — and then judging the host on support, performance and pricing like anything else.
The broader lesson is one this industry keeps teaching: an infrastructure dependency owned by a private equity firm is a pricing risk, and it will eventually be exercised. The hosts that survived comfortably were the ones that could switch.
Published 18 June 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.