Hello everyone!
As a result of the demand created by the cPanel pricing fiasco, we've been forced to drop our loss-leader "Lifetime Licenses" earlier than planned. These licenses were not sustainable to begin with, but with an community-minded & non-abusive customer base like ours, we've managed to offer them for almost 15 years. I don't think anyone else could have done that.
Most importantly, we are not taking away anyone's lifetime license, and we are not going to start charging for updates. A promise is a promise.
This announcement only relates to the sale of new licenses.
So here's what's happening:
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New Accounts
Sorry, our traditional lifetime licenses are no longer available. This applies to datacenter (internal) licenses as well.
The only exception is our $299 lifetime license. It is still being offered with a "never expire" promise, support/updates for 1 year, and you can (optionally) add another year at any time for $99.
A new "Lite" license is being introducted on August 15 that can be installed on any type of server. It will be heavily discounted and intended for the personal user, hobbyist, etc. for those who need a few users/domains.
Existing Accounts
We realize that your business model may depend on the regular ordering of these licenses, so we are phasing them out over 60 days, to ensure there is plenty of notice. It would be unfair & disrespectful to simply remove these licenses without warning or explanation.
You have until September 1 to keep ordering lifetime licenses. To prevent abuse (hoarding), new purchases will be throttled (controlled) automatically by our system. You will be able to purchase new licenses at the same general rate/quantities you normally order at.
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To prevent unauthorized reselling and a lifetime license "black market" we are going to be a little less helpful about a couple things we've been overly accommodating about in the past. We are no longer pushing/moving licenses between accounts, especially after several of our customers have been scammed by people selling licenses from hacked accounts. License portability/reselling is never something we offered as a feature so we need to crack down on this a little better.
The second issue relates mostly to the internal/datacenter bulk lifetime licenses. We've been allowing near-excessive levels of free license recycling (IP changing so the license can be reused over and over as customers come and go). This in itself is not a bad practice. Recycling is good
But it is also used for unauthorized reselling. It is also used for piracy (back-and-forth IP changing to allow one license to operate many servers).
Unlimited updates is something we promised, but unlimited recycling is not. We plan to crack down on this by allowing a very small amount of free changes, and then a minimal fee (maybe a dollar or two) for each change after that. Not enough of a fee to be a money grab, but it will help a bit with sustainability (and mostly as an anti-abuse measure).
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Finally, please share your comments and let's discuss. This announcement has been a long time coming and I really hope that our intent is viewed as productive and respectful to our customer base. We are forced to make these changes, but I certainly hope anything above doesn't make our valued costumers feel like they have been betrayed or mislead in any way.
Let's discuss!
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