Ionos customers fume at mid-contract Plesk hike

Web host blames partner's license fee increase, but users say notice was too short and terms unfair

Exclusive Hosting biz Ionos is hiking the price of its server instances, blaming an increase in Plesk license costs. Customers have a month to accept the increase or else disable Plesk on their account.

The German business recently sent an email to customers of its virtual private server (VPS) service, notifying them that an extra fee would be levied as of October 30.

This charge comprises a monthly fee of £5 (excluding VAT) per Plesk license, which may not seem like much, but because each server a customer operates has its own Plesk license, the extra costs would soon mount up for anyone running more than a few server instances.

In the letter, seen by The Register, Ionos says that its partner (WebPros International), which provides the Plesk software and associated licenses, has "significantly increased" the price of licenses. "We can only offset these costs to a limited extent and are therefore forced to pass the price increase on to you," it states.

Customers are presented with two options: do nothing, and the extra costs will be automatically billed to them monthly from October 30, or remove Plesk from their server instances by deleting the license key to avoid the extra charge.

However, Plesk is the hosting control panel through which customers manage their servers and the services running on them, and removing it could make management more troublesome. It may be possible to run an alternative admin control panel, of course.

Ionos customers who contacted The Register expressed annoyance at the price increase, particularly as it was coming mid-contract term for many, while other complaints included that a month was not much notice to give, should they decide they would like to move to another host rather than pay up.

"I can imagine this is going to be a big hike for customers with many servers, and with such short notice (just over a month) they know people are going to struggle to migrate elsewhere in that time frame. I can't believe that they had only a few weeks' notice of this happening," said one customer, who asked not to be identified.

We should point out that the terms and conditions in the Ionos service contract would seem to cover the firm for this: "We reserve the right to change the prices and/or nature of our services by giving you 30 days written notice of those changes."

Nevertheless, one customer questioned whether upping the price in the middle of the contract term was legit, rather than applying the increase on renewal. There were also questions about whether Ionos is within its rights to start charging for something – Plesk – that was billed as a free part of the service on its website at the time of writing.

We would like to put these questions to Ionos, but the company has so far failed to respond to any of our attempts to contact it for multiple days.

Perhaps if someone at Ionos is reading this, they can get in touch? ®