The web hosting business is a strange old game. We’ve been in it since 2007 and have seen various events unfold in this time but recently something happened that I don’t think anybody saw coming.

As of February 2024 Hostgator have stopped selling reseller plans to new customers.

If you head on over to the website of that big blue gator and try and order a reseller plan you will be taken to the order page for a VPS plan, the cheapest of which will cost you a handsome $91.99 per month after the first billing term. A far cry from the cheapest reseller plan than was previously on offer for $34.95 per month after the first term.

At first people thought this was merely an error by an over eager web designer but the discontinuing of the reseller plans was confirmed by a Hostgator agent on live chat who said:

Please note that the Resellers packages have been discontinued and is replaced by the VPS packages as they have more features.

Nobody saw this coming because historically Hostgator were one of the first big players to take advantage of cPanel’s reseller functionality. You could go as far as to say this was a huge driving force that made Hostgator Founder Brent Oxley a cool ~$300m when he sold Hostgator to the Endurance International Group (EIG) back in 2013, so for them to suddenly stop offering reseller hosting accounts to new customers is a bit of a bombshell.

A lot of people are assuming this has to do with cPanel’s change to account based license pricing which in turn means that reseller plans were not nearly as profitable as they once where but it’s just one of the many theories that are out there.

So what does this all mean for existing Hostgator reseller customers?

At present the honest answer is that nobody knows. As of yet it appears that Hostgator will continue to service their existing reseller customers as normal but there have already been stories of price rises from Hostgator customers on Web Hosting Talk, so whilst existing reseller accounts may continue to function for the time being it looks like they may be subject to price rises going forward.

It isn’t the only strange thing going on over in EIG/Newfold Digital land. A number of their brands (and there are LOTS of different brands!) have stopped taking any new orders at all and are directing customers over to either Bluehost or Web.com to place their orders. So it looks like EIG/Newfold are quietly going about closing down a lot of their subsidiaries and will be running fewer of them going forward, possibly to save on costs but who knows!?

I’m happy to report that here at D9 Hosting headquarters we have no intention of discontinuing our popular reseller hosting plans that have been going strong since 2007. We even offer an unlimited number of inbound transfers so if you are looking to flee the Hostgator sinking ship come and speak to us and we will be happy to get you migrated over to a proper web host!