I hadn't considered moving off cpanel due to the ease of migration (cpanel to cpanel import process is pretty robust and stable from my past experiences).
What was your process? did you do a lot of manual work to create accounts and then restore filesystem and .sql import?
I have a LOT of set up between redis, elastic, s3 certs, ssl, email, etc that i would not like to spend too much time manually fixing if i can.
I'm certainly open to plesk as cpanel cost is outrageous now.
Cost was a factor for us too; we'd gone with cPanel originally a few years ago because we were toying with offering micro hosting packages to our community members who wanted to put up really simple niche web pages, but ended up not bothering. However, we found cPanel really intuitive to use and stable so we stuck with it and got it on the next few servers as we upgraded.
When we were looking to move to AlmaLinux - and had decided on a new server instead of upgrading - we found a great offer which was a server with very similar specs to what we had, but around 65% of current cost - the only difference was Plesk instead of cPanel. We were a bit cautious at first, moving away to another management tool doesn't always work out for the best, but we were confident enough at the command line to consider it, knowing we could likely tweak it manually if it couldn't be done in Plesk's web UI. Also, we're no longer in a situation where you need to spend days fine-tuning a server, you can simply over-spec and do the basic tuning and it'll be pretty much fast enough for most of your visitors and members.
We did a lot of searching and reading beforehand to make sure that with Plesk we could install most of the packages we use, or if not, manually install/tweak what we needed - and that there was a migration tool from cPanel to Plesk (
which worked really well) - and then ordered the server on the basis that if it didn't work out we could switch to cPanel and carry on regardless.
We got stuck in straight away adding/tweaking components until we had it pretty near our current server then moved the smallest of the sites we host onto the new server. Went without incident and the site worked great from the off. Moved a few more, and had a couple of little tweaks to do - related to WP plugins - but they went fine, no major disasters.
We left our biggest community until last and to our end users the migration was seamless (we closed the site, advised it was down for a short while for maintenance, and them moved it
lock, stock and barrel to the new server without telling them). No one noticed! The only pointer came the next day when a few members pointed out it was responding more quickly than previously!
They're still oblivious.
It took a bit of getting used to Plesk, and some things are done a bit differently, but crucially all the key basics were easily covered and for everything else there was a work-around.
I'd say community support isn't as good as cPanel but if you have some basic hosting/server management experience you should be fine.
