Billing
A VServer bills by the hour, capped at the plan's monthly price. Both halves of that matter: you are not on a monthly contract, and you also cannot be surprised by an hourly bill that exceeds the advertised figure.
Stopping a server does not stop the bill
A stopped server is billed at the same rate as a running one, because its memory, disk and IP address stay reserved for it. Only deleting it stops the meter.
How the numbers work
The hourly rate is the plan's monthly price divided by 730 hours, which is the industry-standard month length. Every hour a server exists, that rate is added to its running total for the current calendar month.
Once that total reaches the plan's monthly price, the server stops accruing for the rest of the month. The counter resets on the 1st.
So the mechanism produces the two results people expect and one they often do not:
- A server that runs a whole month costs exactly the monthly price.
- A server deleted on the 5th costs roughly a sixth of it.
- A server that only ran for a week but is stopped, not deleted, costs the full monthly price, because it is still there.
The cap is per server. Four servers have four separate caps.
The first month
Checkout charges the plan's monthly price up front, and that payment covers your first month of service. Hourly billing does not start until it runs out, counted from the moment the server actually goes live rather than from when you paid, so a slow payment method does not eat into what you bought.
In practice: the first invoice is the plan price, hourly amounts start showing up a month later, and until then the server contributes nothing to your estimate.
What counts as billable
A server bills while it is Active, Stopped, Resizing or Reinstalling.
It does not bill while it is Provisioning, and it stops billing the moment it goes to Failed, so a server we could not build is never charged for. If a server fails permanently after its retries, its billing is cancelled outright and the case is raised with us.
After a plan change
Changing the plan switches the hourly rate at the moment the change lands. The hours before it are billed at the old rate and the hours after at the new one, so an upgrade halfway through the month costs roughly half of each.
The cap follows the current plan, for the whole calendar month. Upgrade and your ceiling for that month is the larger plan's price; downgrade and it is the smaller one's, which can mean a month where you have already accrued more than the new cap and nothing further is charged at all.
Where to see it
Invoices → Estimated Costs in the portal breaks the current period down by category. The VServer category lists one line per server with its projected month-end figure, which is what has accrued so far plus the current rate for the rest of the month, clamped at the cap.
Figures in that panel are net. The plan prices in the shop and on the product page are gross, including 19 % VAT, and the VAT is added back on the invoice itself.
Cancelling
There is no cancellation period and no notice to give: delete the server and billing ends there, with the final part-hour on your next invoice. See Deleting a server.
Deleting is also the only way to stop paying. There is no pause, no hibernate and no archive.
What's next
- Managing your server for plan changes and deletion
- VServer overview for what each plan includes