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 extremely competitive market, and it is a shrinking market. We'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.
If you haven't found the dozens of direct competitors to cPanel (at least a half-dozen of which are credible substitutes for most users), you haven'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't even the other control panels, it's all the other ways people are building sites and apps. We aren't losing customers to other control panels, generally speaking; we lose them to completely different ways of doing things.
The traditional control panel market is shrinking as more and more people and companies move to cloud native deployments or to services like Squarespace/Wix/WordPress.com/Shopify/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.
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's a whole new paradigm. There'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/Wix/WordPress.com/Shopify niche) look like. We've been moving in the cloud native direction in Virtualmin for a while, but it's a major undertaking and there is very little immediate benefit to existing customers (and, Cloudmin, despite it'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's a classic innovator's dilemma. Our customers want a faster horse (or, in your case, a cheaper horse), but in five to ten years, most won't want a horse at all.
Also, I think you'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.
Thanks so much for your detailed response. And thanks for your contribution to the space with VirtualMin.
It appears it would be unwise to just build a direct competitor to CPanel, Plesk, etc. Not only would that be short-sighted (given the competitiveness you've highlighted), it would be unnecessary (because control panels don't appear to be required tooling for the people buying cloud infrastructure).
According to Gartner, Cloud IaaS revenue was $90B in 2021, but the combined revenues of CPanel and Plesk in the same year couldn't break $100M (according to data from Datanyze and ZoomInfo). This is a clear signal that those who are buying cloud infrastructure from Amazon, Microsoft, et al. don't have an essential need for these tools. And even at the smaller providers like DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. you'd have to be unreasonable to pay $20 per month for a license to manage a $5 per month droplet; the panel won't even install on a $10 droplet.
It's kind of funny, because the things that can be done on that single droplet/server are incredible. What can't you build? Unfortunately, control panels as they are setup (and have been setup for ages) can't cater to aspirations. People need user-friendly tools they can use to build things on servers; by themselves and/or with others.
You're right about the innovator's dilemma though. Your customers aren't going to tell you what could be, only how 'what currently is' could be a little different. It's going to take some kind of leap, but the companies seemingly thriving in this space may have become too comfortable collecting license fees to make it. Maybe they've seen it (or something like it), but the refactoring cost and mental paradigm shift constitutes too much inertia to overcome their comfort zone without a looming existential calamity staring at them in the face.
'Going to take a crack at it. I have a few ideas I think could work, but I'll never know unless I test them out. There'll be a server management aspect to it, but that's not going to be the main. And I don't think 10 months is too optimistic for an MVP. Again, it's not going to be a CPanel clone; not that many folks really need that.
Is it ok to check in with you later in the process and perhaps bounce a few ideas off?
If you haven't found the dozens of direct competitors to cPanel (at least a half-dozen of which are credible substitutes for most users), you haven'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't even the other control panels, it's all the other ways people are building sites and apps. We aren't losing customers to other control panels, generally speaking; we lose them to completely different ways of doing things.
The traditional control panel market is shrinking as more and more people and companies move to cloud native deployments or to services like Squarespace/Wix/WordPress.com/Shopify/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.
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's a whole new paradigm. There'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/Wix/WordPress.com/Shopify niche) look like. We've been moving in the cloud native direction in Virtualmin for a while, but it's a major undertaking and there is very little immediate benefit to existing customers (and, Cloudmin, despite it'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's a classic innovator's dilemma. Our customers want a faster horse (or, in your case, a cheaper horse), but in five to ten years, most won't want a horse at all.
Also, I think you'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.