How licensing works — Docs — the lean cPanel alternative

The one rule: your hosting never goes down because of us

ExtraCP's licensing is built around a single promise: a problem reaching the license server must never break your customers' hosting. It is never "fail-closed".

How it works

When you buy a plan, you get a license key (EXCP-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX).
Your server checks in with the license server and receives a cryptographically signed status token.
Your install verifies the signature with a built-in public key and caches the last good token locally.

The private signing key stays on the license server; your install only ever needs the public key. Nobody can forge a license, and your server can confirm a real one entirely offline.

Offline tolerance

If the license server is unreachable, your install keeps trusting the last signed status through a validity window plus a grace period — roughly six weeks of runway. During an outage nothing degrades: hosting keeps serving, accounts keep working.

Only a confirmed signal from the license server that a license has expired or been suspended has any effect — and even then it is gentle: it pauses the creation of new accounts. Existing accounts and websites are never touched.

Unlicensed installs

An install with no license configured runs with full function — there is no crippling of an unconfigured server. Enforcement is reasonable, not DRM.

Managing your license

See your key, tier, status, and the servers it's activated on from your account Dashboard. Paid tiers activate on the number of servers included in your plan.