Ask HN: Is there still an opportunity for an affordable CPanel alternative?
I work on Virtualmin, and have for nearly two decades; most of that time as both a commercial product and Open Source project. It is an <i>extremely</i> competitive market, and it is a shrinking market. We&#x27;ve had about 150,000 active servers running Virtualmin GPL+Pro (give or take a few thousand) for the past several years, despite some new users fleeing from the cPanel price increases, and despite a major UI overhaul and lots of improvements in that time. The reason cPanel has raised their prices is that the specific market niche is dying and it is a very expensive product to support.<p>If you haven&#x27;t found the dozens of direct competitors to cPanel (at least a half-dozen of which are credible substitutes for most users), you haven&#x27;t done your market research effectively. According to the market data I have seen, Plesk is now the leader in the market, due to pretty effective deals with some of the largest providers. Nearly all of the competitors to cPanel are cheaper, and some are free, including Virtualmin GPL. And, the real problem for cPanel and all the other control panels isn&#x27;t even the other control panels, it&#x27;s all the other ways people are building sites and apps. We aren&#x27;t losing customers to other control panels, generally speaking; we lose them to completely different ways of doing things.<p>The traditional control panel market is shrinking as more and more people and companies move to cloud native deployments or to services like Squarespace&#x2F;Wix&#x2F;WordPress.com&#x2F;Shopify&#x2F;etc. Developers have been moving to the cloud, small business has been moving to easier to use site builder type services. Shared and VPS hosting is feeling the squeeze on both sides.<p>There are opportunities there in both directions, even in easing the transition for people currently on shared or VPS hosting, and it may even be that some of the control panel makers will make that leap, but it&#x27;s a whole new paradigm. There&#x27;s not a lot of shared code between what cPanel (or any of the dozens of competitors) does and what a cloud native deployment looks like or the services on the low-end (the SquareSpace&#x2F;Wix&#x2F;WordPress.com&#x2F;Shopify niche) look like. We&#x27;ve been moving in the cloud native direction in Virtualmin for a while, but it&#x27;s a major undertaking and there is very little immediate benefit to existing customers (and, Cloudmin, despite it&#x27;s name, is not very cloud native, either). Our customers are not broadly asking for the ability to operate Kubernetes deployments or for the ability to deploy containers to the cloud, for instance. It&#x27;s a classic innovator&#x27;s dilemma. Our customers want a faster horse (or, in your case, a cheaper horse), but in five to ten years, most won&#x27;t want a horse at all.<p>Also, I think you&#x27;re (wildly) underestimating the time it will take to build a credible commercial alternative, when there is already so much competition, including several free products in the space. The minimum viable product to compete with cPanel is hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I would not start a commercial product in this space today, or even ten years ago, despite my now decades of experience in it.