Oakley Capital, the venture capitalist in recent years responsible for multiple acquisitions in the hosting landscape, has reared its ugly head yet again.
Popular software such as the cPanel and Plesk web hosting control panels, WHMCS billing system and SolusVM virtualization management platform were already under the umbrella of Oakley Capital. But in another twist, Buycpanel, a major distributor of cPanel software licenses has now been acquired by cPanel inc.
After cPanel made a shock pricing announcement in late June of this year, users and distributors of cPanel software were caught between a rock and a hard place.
cPanel users and especially resellers and web hosting providers were confronted with steep price increases of sometimes more than 1000%.
Partner agreements in place between distributors, web hosting providers, resellers and cPanel inc. were also null and void. Major distributors of cPanel software, such as Buycpanel.com were denied any incentive to continue reselling cPanel licenses because the new partner agreements in place did not provide the possibility to compete with cpanel licenses purchased directly from the cPanel inc. website.
This put the business model of some resellers and cPanel distributors in direct danger.
Jetbackup
Another possible side-effect of this acquisition is that Jetbackup, a popular cPanel plugin for the creation of backups of hosting accounts, may also be part of this deal. JetBackup is part-owned by the same person behind Buycpanel.
As mentioned, it is not yet clear if Jetbackup is actually part of this acquisition, but if it is it may be that the DirectAdmin version of Jetbackup will not see the light of day.
The DirectAdmin version of JetBackup was announced to be under development shortly after cPanel’s initial shock announcement.
Update: JetBackup have confirmed that they are not part of this acquisition and that development of their product (including support for DirectAdmin) will continue to move forward.
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