What happens when your VPS balance runs out

NoctisNode bills from a prepaid balance, debited per cycle, with no auto-renewal and no card on file. That structure is the reason there are no surprise charges — but it means an unfunded account eventually reaches zero, and you need to know what that looks like.

How billing actually works

Every plan has a monthly price. The balance is debited once per cycle for the server you have running. There is no recurring card charge, no auto-renewal toggle, and nothing that can bill you for something you did not approve. If the balance has funds, the cycle is paid and the server runs. This is documented on the billing docs.

What happens at zero

When the balance can no longer cover the next cycle, the server is suspended. Suspension is recoverable: top up the balance and the server resumes. But a suspended server means downtime, and if you depend on it, downtime is the real cost — which is why the fix is preventative.

Note · Suspension is not deletion. Your data is retained and the server resumes once funded — but do not treat this as a backup strategy.

Prevent it instead

• ▹Check the balance from the panel whenever you log in — it takes two seconds.
• ▹Query the balance through the finance API if you script anything against the account.
• ▹Keep a small buffer — one extra cycle's worth — so a delayed top-up does not become an outage.
• ▹If you run anything business-critical, put a monitoring check on the balance, not just on the server.

Topping up

Deposits are instant once confirmed, and credit automatically to the balance. Because there is no auto-renewal, the server resumes on the next cycle as soon as the balance covers it — there is nothing to manually reactivate.

Multiple servers, one balance

The balance is account-wide, not per-server. Two servers at $10 and $25 are debited $35 per cycle from the same balance, so you manage one number rather than a bill per machine. If you add a server mid-cycle, the debit reflects the plan set at the cycle boundary.

FAQ