How Many Days Do You Actually Get to Change Your Mind on a VPS Deal?

We read the refund terms on eight major VPS providers' own pages. Four publish a number, and it ranges from zero to 30 days. Four more hide theirs behind a bot wall. Here is the table, the exact wording, and how to use it before you buy.

Published: 2026-10-09

Question: How many days do I have to get a refund on a VPS deal, and which providers actually publish a number?

The honest answer is that nobody will tell you, because four of the eight providers we checked do not publish a verifiable refund window at all — their own policy pages refuse automated readers, and one major provider's terms say the opposite of a guarantee. Of the four that do publish a number, the window runs from zero days to 30 days. We pulled every quote below from the providers' own pages on 2026-10-09.

Why the range is this wide

A refund window is not a customer-service perk. It is a legal position, and it tracks where the provider operates.

Hostinger's policy carries a revision stamp of 2026-10-02 — one week before we read it — which is the only page in this set that tells you how old its answer is. That matters more than the number itself: a refund policy you can date is a refund policy you can trust.

Hetzner's 14 days is a consumer withdrawal right under EU distance-selling rules, not a hosting-industry courtesy. Read the clause closely and you will see it is tied to *cancellation notice*, not to *purchase date*. The clock starts when they receive your notice, which means the practical deadline for you is earlier than 14 days after you buy.

DigitalOcean is the one that surprises people. Its terms of service do not offer a trial-and-refund path; they state fees are non-refundable. If you are comparing deals and you assume every host has a 30-day safety net, this is where that assumption costs you money.

The part no comparison post tells you

Four of eight providers make their refund terms effectively unreadable to a machine. Vultr returns a Cloudflare challenge, Contabo returns a security check, Linode's policy route serves a navigation shell with no terms text, and Liquid Web answers with a sentence that manages expectations without committing to anything.

This is not a minor inconvenience, and it is not something the big comparison posts measure. If you cannot read a provider's refund terms before you buy, you are accepting a term you have not read — and the usual roundups quietly skip that, because a provider with no published number cannot be placed in a ranking table.

So treat it as a signal in itself. A provider that makes its refund terms hard to read is telling you something about how hard the refund will be.

How to use this before you buy

Do not start the clock on the day the server feels slow. Start it on the day you pay.

1. Write down the transaction date at checkout. Hostinger's window runs from "the date of the transaction," not from provisioning, activation, or first login. On a deal where you prepay a year, that difference is the whole ballgame.
2. Screenshot the plan card and the checkout total. Every window here is contingent on *what* you bought. Liquid Web's own wording — "varies based on product" — is the industry telling you that the VPS line and the managed line on the same invoice can carry different terms.
3. Set the reminder for day 25, not day 30. Hetzner's 14 days runs from notice received, and cancellation notices need processing time. A reminder on the last day is a reminder that arrives too late.
4. If the provider publishes no number, assume zero. Not "assume 30." Zero. That is what DigitalOcean's terms effectively say, and it is the only safe default when a page refuses to state one.

What we could not verify

We are not going to fill this table with guesses. Vultr, Linode, Contabo, and Liquid Web each refused an automated read of their policy text on 2026-10-09, so their cells say "not verifiable" rather than a number. That is a real result, not a gap in our research: if a reader with a normal browser cannot confirm the term, the term is functionally unpublished.

We also will not average these numbers into a single "industry standard refund window." An average across zero, 14, 30, and unknown would be a number no provider promises and no buyer can use.

The one-line takeaway

Before you buy any VPS deal, find the refund sentence on the provider's own page and write down the day it expires. If you cannot find that sentence, the deal is carrying a cost you have not priced — and the providers that publish a number are, on this specific axis, the ones competing for your business.