Canceling your VPS — the official self-serve flow and what actually happens

This article covers the self-serve cancellation flow in the customer portal, what happens to your data after cancellation, how to time the cancellation to avoid overpaying, and what to do if you change your mind.

The self-serve flow

1. Log in to the customer portal.
2. Services → click the VPS you want to cancel.
3. Click Request Cancellation in the action area.
4. Pick a cancellation type:
   • End of billing period — service runs until the current paid-through date, then terminates. No refund, no early termination, you get full use of what you paid for. This is what most customers want.
   • Immediate — service terminates today. You forfeit any unused portion of the current billing period. Use this only if you no longer need the VPS and want it gone now.
5. Optional: leave a brief reason. We read these and they do influence the product roadmap.
6. Submit.

You'll get an email confirming the cancellation type and the date the service will terminate.

What happens after cancellation submits

For an end-of-period cancellation:

• The service continues running normally until the paid-through date.
• The portal shows the service in "Cancellation pending" status. You can still access it, take backups, and migrate data.
• The next invoice does not generate.
• On the paid-through date, the service terminates: the VM is powered off, then the storage and IPs are de-allocated.

For an immediate cancellation:

• The VM is shut down within a few minutes of submission.
• Storage and IPs are de-allocated shortly after.
• You don't get a credit for the unused portion of the current billing period.

Get your data out FIRST

Cancellation does not pause to ask if you've backed up. Once the service terminates, the VM image and any snapshots are deleted from our storage. We don't keep archival copies of cancelled services.

Before cancelling:

• Pull off-host backups of anything you want to keep. See Off-host backup strategies.
• Export VoIP-specific data: CDRs, voicemails, recordings, backup module .tar from FreePBX.
• Note your current IP if you need to reproduce DNS or firewall rules elsewhere.
• For PBX services, export your phone provisioning configs and SIP trunk passwords (we don't store them separately).

Timing the cancellation

If you submit the cancellation request:

• Before the next renewal invoice generates (14+ days before the paid-through date) — no renewal invoice is created. Clean.
• After the renewal invoice generates but before it's paid — the unpaid renewal invoice is cancelled at the same time. Clean.
• After paying the renewal invoice — the service runs through the new paid-through date. You get what you paid for; we don't refund unused time on end-of-period cancellations.

The renewal invoice generates 14 days before the due date by default. If you know you're cancelling, do it earlier than that to avoid the "wait, did I just pay for another month?" experience.

If you change your mind

A pending cancellation can be reversed any time before the termination date. In the portal, on the service page, click Cancel cancellation. Service continues as normal and the next billing cycle resumes.

A completed cancellation can sometimes be reversed if it was within the last 24-48 hours and the storage hasn't been overwritten yet. Open an Emergency ticket immediately if you cancelled by mistake; the sooner the better. After about 48 hours, the storage is reused and reversal isn't possible.

The "I cancelled but it still shows in the list" cluster

If your service shows as "Terminated" or "Cancelled" in the service list but you can't get it to disappear, that's just the portal showing historical records. It's not a billing issue, it's not still consuming resources, and there's no further action needed. Filter the service list to "Active" to hide terminated services.

If a service shows as "Active" or "Suspended" after you cancelled, open a ticket — that's a status mismatch we need to clean up.

Cancelling vs suspending vs downgrading

If you want to keep the data but stop paying full price, you have alternatives to cancellation:

• Downgrade to the smallest plan — keeps your IP, hostname, and data but at minimum cost. See Upgrading your VPS plan; the same flow works for downgrades on CPU and RAM (not disk).
• Pause via prepayment — open a ticket; we can sometimes accommodate a hold for known durations (e.g., seasonal businesses).
• Snapshot and cancel — take a final off-host backup, cancel, restore later on a new VPS if you come back. The cheapest if you're sure you don't need it now.