How NoctHost works

1. Your balance

Everything starts with a USD-denominated balance. You top it up with cryptocurrency - Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT and 300+ other coins - and the confirmed amount is credited to your balance. USDT on Tron, BSC, Ethereum and Polygon starts at $5; other coins start at $20. Crypto needs nothing but your email.

You can also pay by card: Visa and Mastercard, plus Apple Pay or Google Pay where your browser supports it, from $20. Card payments are processed by our payment partner, which acts as the seller for that payment, asks for billing details, may add local VAT on its checkout and sends you its own receipt. We never see your card number. If you want to stay no-KYC, pay with crypto.

One balance funds everything: every server, every provider, every location. You always see your total hourly spend, so you know exactly how long your balance lasts.

2. Deploying a server

Pick a size, a location and a hostname - in the dashboard or over the API. We provision the server on the underlying cloud provider via their API, and in about 60 seconds you have a dedicated IPv4 and root access over SSH.

There are 233 sizes to pick from, in four lines of hardware: VPS, Dedicated CPU, GPU, Bare metal. Our own eight tiers cost the same on every provider; everything else is the provider's own size at its own price, and the tab in the deploy form says which is which.

The hourly price is fixed at deploy time. If our catalog prices change later, servers you already run keep the price they started with.

3. Hourly billing

Each server deducts its hourly price from your balance for every hour it exists - running or stopped. Destroy a server and the charges stop the same hour. There is no minimum commitment: a server that lived 3 hours costs 3 hours.

A calendar month never costs more than the monthly price on the card. An hourly rate times 744 hours in a long month would come to slightly more, so the charge stops at the monthly price and the rest of that month is free. Short months simply cost less.

4. Traffic

Every size comes with included outbound traffic, from 500 GB on the smallest plan up to several terabytes on the larger ones. Inbound traffic is not counted.

Going over it does not switch anything off. The excess is billed at $0.01 per GB from your balance, and we email you at 80% of the allowance so the first paid gigabyte is not a surprise. A hard cut-off would have solved our problem at your expense; a price solves it without anyone being switched off.

The allowance resets at the start of each month. If you expect heavy traffic every month, a larger size includes more and works out cheaper than paying the overage.

5. When the balance runs out

We never silently delete your data. At zero balance your servers are suspended and you get a grace period to top up, with warnings sent before and during it. Only after the grace period expires are servers permanently removed.

Two exceptions, and both are stated before you buy. A GPU server is deleted rather than snapshotted: its disk is too large to keep for the price the server earns, so copy results off as you go. A bare metal machine has no snapshot API at the provider at all, so it is deleted too.

6. The recovery key

Every Linux server we deploy carries one extra SSH key of ours, unique to that machine. It has one purpose: if you lose your root password, you pick a new one in the dashboard and we set it on the running server. Nothing is erased and your IP does not change.

We are not hiding it. The key is in your authorized_keys, the exact line is shown on the server page, and one button removes it from the machine for good. Windows servers never get one, because they do not run cloud-init.

If you remove it, a forgotten password can only be fixed by reinstalling the server, which erases the disk. Keep your password somewhere safe first.

Under the hood

NoctHost maintains accounts with each cloud provider and orchestrates them through a single provisioning layer with status synchronization - if anything diverges between us and the provider, it is reconciled within a minute. Your servers are ordinary cloud instances; we add one account, one balance, billing and one consistent API on top.