Most shared hosting plans use cpanel. It's still widely used yes for a lot of smaller websites.

And even if it doesn’t look like it chances are it still is with a fancier ui on top.

I wonder how much shared hosting is there really left, I imagine much of it move to VPS or cheap cloud boxes.

There's still a very big market of people for whom being given a VPS with ssh access and a command line is beyond their technical capability or comfort level.

Ever seen the upsell offers in the check-out workflow for hosting packages that come when you buy a new .com domain from any major registrar? All those are shared hosting packages where everything is done through some sort of web gui.

I highly doubt that. It's giant market and with these custom small sites made by third parties you actually want to have client owned hosting and third parties who deploy to that hosting. Clients have learned to separate these otherwise the third party can have huge leverage (your business and all data is ours).

But you have to keep a VPS updated yourself, right? A hosted site doesn't require any action from the customer to stay up to date.

I'm especially curious how much small-scale shared hosting is left. The big companies like EIG are certainly still around, but the little one-off hosting companies are much less common.

There are a lot of things that have been up for decades. The ROI on moving a simple PHP or static website to new hosting situation hasn’t been that compelling… though that could change. Thing is, I suspect most users of shared hosting which is Cpanel’s bread and butter are not reading the latest cybersecurity news.

The ROI has just increased by like 10x or 100x this week.

CPanel on shared hosting running WordPress PHP is literally half of the entire internet still.

Half of the entire internet is Meta properties.

That’s the other half.

Coincidentally also PHP.

Facebook started out PHP; but they ship-of-theseus'ed it into Hack by replacing the standard library, the language, and the runtime engine, so now it's a totally different thing with only a few superficial similarities (FWIW IMO Hack is much better than PHP, I'm sad that it never gained traction...)

Much of what was good in Hack just got rolled into PHP.

And if it's not cpanel, it's Plesk

I run an entire saas that 36 companies pay for, built in PHP, and I drag and drop the files to the server via cpanel.