OVH vs. cPanel licensing - No upgrade options available
For those of you who are not aware of this, OVH customers are unable to upgrade our cPanel licenses. That's right, if your license currently allows for 500 accounts, once you reached that limit and attempts to create a new account in that particular server, you'll find out you're out of luck. The following error message is shown:
"Creating the account would exceed the number of licensed users. Please upgrade your license and try again."
Unfortunately, no upgrade option is available there and, according to our Business Support Account Manager at OVH, it's been going on for at least 8 months. His advice is to migrate our licenses over to cPanel directly, which would basically double our costs as we are not a cPanel Partner (even though we greatly exceed the minimum accounts criteria and yet cPanel never responded to our application last year).
To put it simply, if you expect a new server to reach 500 customers over the course of its lifespan, you must provision it with a 500 account license right from the start as you won't be able to upgrade it at a later time. In other words, if you'd like to upgrade your server license gradually as it grows, that won't work. You must pick between wasting a lot of money on unused licensed "bulk accounts" during the growth phase or end up with quite a lot of unused hardware capacity later on.
We now have two servers with an abundance of hardware resources and yet we can't keep them growing as their respective cPanel licenses are maxed out. Needless to say, this situation is utterly ridiculous.
I have been using cPanel since the early 2000's and so has the company I represent, we have never expected to go through something of this sort.
Let me point out a few things:
1) It's never been agreed upon in its Terms of Service that cPanel could arbitrarily hinder our server's user base expansion at will with no option to upgrade.
2) The vast majority of our server's have been provisioned before all the changes Oakley brought into the table last year and our licenses limits were automatically set according to the amount of accounts the server had back then, so this situation was unavoidable for us as we only learned about this issue once one of our servers hit its accounts limit.
3) I don't know if this is a problem at OVH or a restriction placed by cPanel against its resellers, either way, as an authorized reseller of your software, cPanel is, to a certain extent, liable for arbitrary restrictions its authorized resellers pose to their end users by the means of its software.
We have servers spanning from a few dozens all the way up to 800+ accounts, therefore licensing cost would go up substantially should we take our licenses directly with cPanel itself. Right now two of them are maxed out (a Public Cloud instance containing 100 accounts and a bare metal with 600), screenshots attached below.
It should be noted that this is not a small reseller we are referring to, OVH is certainly one of cPanel's largest (if not the largest) resellers out there. This has a potential to affect a substantial portion of your user base.
Please let me know if you can intervene on this subject, otherwise I'll try and take it higher up within OVH.
Thank you.
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HI @Bretas thank you for reaching out here in the cPanel community. Firstly we would like to apologize for any problems you may have encountered. I do want to note that the way that our partners' issue or resell the cPanel & WHM licensing is not something we can control. All partners have the ability to offer the same licensing model as that which you find on our retail store, but they are able to implement restrictions on accounts for those licenses as you have encountered. We recommend that you contact your licensing provider (OVH) for other options. In this instance, it does appear you're looking for an autoscale license that we do make available to all our Partners though we do not control whether or not they offer this. Alternatively, you may get licensing directly from cPanel or obtain an additional virtual environment or server with cPanel & WHM as well with OVH, you may also want to look at the potential for becoming a cPanel Partner yourself with the number of accounts you have you may qualify. You can get more information on being a partner as well as apply for it here: Partners 0 -
I do not believe OVH does have a good platform, I did try it and they have much downtime at the time. 0 -
I left OVH. I never got a license through them. I had problems with their image backups freezing my instances. I switched to AWS. It costs more but was worth it. 0 -
It works so that you cancel the license, and then you order a bigger (or in some cases smaller) license. It's just that you can't order the new license before the old license in not active any more. 0 -
You can definitely upgrade a cPanel license with OVH, it's just a bit of a convoluted process and has to be done via their API. To be fair this is more cPanel's fault with their horrible new licensing scheme. 0 -
@CanSpace - if you've got details you can share I'd be happy to see if I can get some documentation updated or if I can find a better process. 0 -
If you (or whoever has a service with OVH) opens a ticket and asks about updating cPanel licenses, they will provide a fairly detailed step-by-step process to do so using their API. You essentially cancel the old license and order a new one simultaneously. The issue is that you are made to pay for the new license immediately, and you are not refunded for the previous one. So if you for example upgrade from 800 to 900 accounts, you would forfeit whatever remaining payment you had left for the 800 account license - which is not cheap at all. One way around this is to upgrade the very last day of the month so that you don't forfeit a lot, but then you might have to have a server stuck on 800 accounts waiting to upgrade the license before you can add another account. Overall it's a complete nuisance, but again it's the fault of cPanel and their horrible / greedy new licensing scheme. There really isn't much OVH can do about it and I sympathize with the position they are in - it must have been a nightmare dealing with this, as it has been for everyone using cPanel. Not to mention the most recent price increase AGAIN coming up in a few days, and the impending doom just waiting for when it happens yet again. 0 -
Thanks for the details. That sounds like an issue that is specific to the licenses purchased through OVH. In general, cPanel licenses aren't tied to a specific provider, so that is something related to their configuration. If the license was purchased directly from cPanel you could upgrade/downgrade on the fly with no changes needing to happen on the server side, except for the license refresh command needing to be run if you needed that to happen instantly. 0
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