WebPros

WebPros is the group that owns the two control panels most shared hosting is administered through, cPanel and Plesk, together with the billing system WHMCS, the VPS manager SolusVM and a set of website-building, SEO, social-media, backup and monitoring products, as its solutions page lists. The group is run from WebPros International GmbH in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and its privacy policy names a separate operating entity for each brand: the Swiss company for Plesk, a US company for cPanel and WHM, a UK company for WHMCS. Nearly everything it sells is licensed to hosting providers, who put their own name on it.

The group was assembled by a private-equity buyer. Oakley Capital carved Plesk out of the Parallels group in 2017, as its acquisition announcement records, and in 2018 bought SolusVM and a majority of cPanel from its founder, per its cPanel announcement. In December 2019 Oakley agreed to sell the group to a CVC Capital Partners fund while reinvesting as a minority partner, as its sale announcement sets out, so CVC has been the majority owner since. Two founders of Host Europe, Thomas Strohe and Jochen Berger, invested alongside Oakley from the Plesk deal onward, as Oakley’s case study describes; their Cologne investment company, Equivia, lists WebPros on its portfolio page as a 2017 investment with a partial exit to CVC.

Worth knowing

WebPros also hosts. WebPros Cloud runs managed WordPress and cPanel shared hosting on infrastructure the group operates, sold to hosting providers, registrars and agencies to resell under their own brand at their own price; its FAQ says a new partner signs a cPanel partner agreement first. Nothing on it is sold to a site owner directly and no price is published, which is why the group sits beside the register while the panels it owns have records in it.