Stop auto-renew, not your server: how cancellation works

Cancelling a server should not require a support ticket, a retention call or a form hidden four menus deep. On InstantNode it is one toggle: auto-renew. Every server has it, on by default. Switch it off and nothing dramatic happens - your server keeps running exactly as before, until the billing period you already paid for ends. Then it expires on its own. Switch it back on any time before expiry and nothing was ever cancelled.

The timeline, precisely

1. Today: you disable auto-renew (panel or API). The server is now marked to expire at the end of its paid runtime.
2. Until period end: full service - the server runs, backups run, nothing is throttled. You paid for this time; it is yours.
3. Period end: the server expires and is taken offline. Its backups are purged with it - that is deliberate data hygiene, not an accident.

Before the end: take your data

Download a backup, rsync what matters, or dump your databases - whichever fits. The one rule: do it before expiry. We cannot hand out data from a server that no longer exists, and we would not want to be a company that keeps ghost copies of expired customers' disks.

Why we do it this way

Prepaid balance plus per-server auto-renew means the failure modes are gentle: no surprise card charge for a forgotten test server, no server deleted mid-period because a payment bounced. German law also gives every consumer a cancellation button - ours is at /cancel-contract - but the honest version of compliance is making the normal path so simple that the legal path is redundant.