Abusive cPanel license suspension

[MegaBytu]

Dear cPanel,

As you may probably know, many of your clients are buying cPanel licenses directly from the datacenter provider, not because of any discounts, but because of the convenience of the billing (the license is bundeled with the dedicated server).

In past 3 months, cPanel has suspended twice all the licenses for all our servers, without any notice and for unknown reason, basically crippeling our server administration capacity and speed of reaction. This approach is abusive, and we are considering of switching to other server management system, because doing so works as putting down our servers without any notice.

As per our hosting provider, cPanel failed to process the license paymens in time.

Obviously, we can't know for sure, we had no notification in WHM about any pending payments for the respective licenses, we suddenly saw our licenses suspended.

cPanel shoud put in place a mechanism in WHM to inform prior to the suspension of any cPanel license that there is a pending problem with the respective license.

As is right know, cPanel is a vulnerability.

Regards,

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! I'm sorry to hear about this issue with the licenses. If you're seeing issues with a certain license provider, please send those concerns through a ticket to our support team, or directly to [email protected] where our Customer Service team can provide guidance on that.

With a license purchased from a third-party provider, we can't intervene for the end-user on our end - how that license is handled is completely up to the provider. However, you always have the option of purchasing a license directly through the cPanel store, and then you can deal with us directly for any payment and licensing needs.

 

[MegaBytu]

cPanel should put in place a mechanism in WHM to inform prior to the suspension of the cPanel license coresponding to that server, that there is a pending problem (for example overdue payment) with the license on that server. In that situatiom, the administrator of the server, will see the pending problem in WHM, and after that he can contact the license provider (hosting company/datacenter etc.), to resolve the issue, prior to the suspension, without impacting the services running on that server.

This is a civiilized way of dealing with those issues. Today cPanel had suspended many of our servers, in the middle of traffic spikes. We had to contact the datacenter, which had contacted cPanel and solved the issue within 1 hour, but the aproach was completely inappropriate. Take the example from Microsoft, which has a countdown in Windows/other products, that states the product must be activated within a timeframe of X days.

 

[cPRex]

Could you submit a feature request using the link in my signature? I can bring it up with the team during our meeting next week.

I will say, this is almost certainly something that the license holder would disable, as they aren't going to want to reveal to end-users that they may be behind in payment, so I'm not sure this would help your situation even if it were implemented.

 

[MegaBytu]

License holder should not be able to disable the feature, as long as the license holder does not have root access to the server. It would confer transparency to license users and may help the license users to choose providers with good financial practices.

Added the feature request: https://features.cpanel.net/topic/22609-license-status-and-pending-issues-feature-in-whm

 

[cPRex]

I got the request approved.

There are actually several things that can be controlled at the license provider level, so they never even reach your server. For example, this user I replied to just earlier today has a license where the provider has limited the AutoSSL feature:

problem with certificate parent cpanel - run autossl no work

I have problem with certificate, my server with sub domain subdomain.domain.com not renew certificate, the domain into server if have the certificate for any motive the server not inherits the certificate, it is cause the domains in the server not actualize the certificate. Show the next image...

forums.cpanel.net

 

[MegaBytu]

I got the request approved.

There are actually several things that can be controlled at the license provider level, so they never even reach your server. For example, this user I replied to just earlier today has a license where the provider has limited the AutoSSL feature:

problem with certificate parent cpanel - run autossl no work

I have problem with certificate, my server with sub domain subdomain.domain.com not renew certificate, the domain into server if have the certificate for any motive the server not inherits the certificate, it is cause the domains in the server not actualize the certificate. Show the next image...

forums.cpanel.net

Thanks. I understand, but this feature I am proposing should not be possible to be disabled by the license holder. There is no real reason for a license status feature to be disabled, except if the reason is a misleading one, in which case cPanel should not tolerate it as an argument. Situations when cPanel suspend the license without notice, affecting the license users, but not the license holders, can turn agains cPanel in loss of business due to the users choosing other server management solution.