Did 120 cPanel to DA in 2022. Took 3 weeks, broke 14 WordPress sites because of softaculous backup incompatability, and I had to hand-hold 30 customers who couldn't find "File Manager" in the new skin.
Would not recommend at scale without a staging run.
Member
This. The backup format isn't the issue, it's the restore path. cPanel backup → DA restore works for files and databases but email filters and forwarders are a manual rebuild. I scripted the mail part but cron jobs? Customers just have to re-enter them.
I did 200, not 400. Ticket spike lasted 10 days.
Member
Hestia user here. 80 accounts, not 800, so grain of salt.
The GitHub is active because half the commits are translations and CSS tweaks. The core is solid but the documentation is wiki-quality. You will be reading source code to solve edge cases.
For 800 accounts? You'd be the biggest Hestia deployment anyone's heard of. That's not a flex, that's a support burden.
You will not. Assume 10% of customers open a ticket for "where did the button go" even if you send three warning emails. 10% of 400 is 40. Plus the actual failures. Plus the ones who didn't read the email.
Budget 80/day for two weeks.
Following.
Same situation as Richard. 600 accounts, mixed cPanel and Plesk because of acquisitions. Consolidation is the dream but the migration reality is waking up at 3am to fix a broken SSL redirect.
Plesk's license is actually competitive now for mixed stacks. Anyone compared three-way?
Plesk wants $9.16/month for Web Admin, $13.78 for Web Pro. Per server. For 600 accounts you'd need Pro or multiple Admin licenses. Still cheaper than cPanel per-account at volume?
Maybe. But then you're on Plesk, which is its own thread of pain.
CloudPanel user checking in. Free, fast, but no end-user email management to speak of. Fine for devs, death for shared hosting.
Richard's customers sound like classic shared hosting. CloudPanel is not the answer.
This.
At 2000 accounts that's $360/month. Richard pays $380 for 800. Your per-account is better but your absolute is similar. The difference is scale, not genius.
Also "cash only" in your profile explains a lot about your negotiation posture.
