A 48-hour refund window looks stingy next to a subscription you can cancel anytime — until you notice that provisioning happens the moment payment clears, not after some trial period. The window is short because the thing it is protecting against starts immediately.
Why instant provisioning shapes the policy
Unlike a SaaS subscription with near-zero marginal cost per signup, a server plan reserves real memory and CPU on real hardware the instant an invoice is paid — that resource is set aside whether or not the buyer ever logs in. A long, no-questions refund window on something provisioned that fast is an open door to reserving capacity, using it, and returning it for free; the 48-hour window exists to give genuine mistaken purchases and immediate dealbreakers a way out, without turning refunds into a way to rent hardware at no cost.
What qualifies and what does not
| Situation | Refund eligible? |
|---|---|
| Requested within 48 hours of the first purchase, new client | Yes, as a standard cancellation |
| A verified outage exceeding 24 consecutive hours | Yes, this is the service-failure exception, independent of the 48-hour window |
| Resource exhaustion from your own plugins or mods | No — the plan performed as sized; the configuration running on it is what changed |
| An in-game ban or AUP suspension | No — the service was delivered; a suspension is a consequence of its use, not a service failure |
| A renewal after the first 48 hours | No — all sales are final past that window |
A refund ends the service the same way non-payment does — the container and its data go with it. Whatever you built stays yours only in the copy you took of it yourself.