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🧾 Balance Required to Create a VM

✅ TL;DR

To create a VM on a prepaid account, your balance must cover the full monthly price of the plan, even though you are then billed by the hour.

How It Works

Full month up front, hourly after

  • To create the VM: your balance must be at least the plan's full monthly price.
  • After it is created: you are billed hourly, for every hour the VM exists.

The up-front balance is not a charge. It is not taken from you and it is not a deposit. It stays as your balance and is drawn down hour by hour as you use the VM.

The Error

Not enough funds

If your balance is below the plan's monthly price, provisioning is refused:

Not enough funds
DETAIL:  This model costs 31.66 EUR, you have 10.00 EUR available
HINT:    Please top up your account or contact support

Top up to at least the amount shown as the model's cost and the order will go through.

Why

Our prices assume sustained use

Our plans are priced for servers that run for months and years, on enterprise hardware built for exactly that. The price is low because it assumes a full month of use.

The balance requirement keeps that model honest: an account can always cover the service it has ordered, so nothing runs into debt and nothing gets cut off mid-month.

Postpaid Accounts

Not affected

Postpaid (monthly invoice) accounts are exempt from this check entirely. They can provision regardless of balance, because they are invoiced after use rather than drawing down a prepaid balance.

See Prepaid vs Postpaid for how to qualify.

Short-Lived and Burst Workloads

We are not a hyperscaler

If your workload is a job that spins a large instance up for a few hours a day and deletes it again, we are not the right fit, and we would rather tell you that up front than take your money.

Yes, the hourly billing means a VM created and deleted the same day costs only those hours. But you still need the full monthly price on your balance to create it each time, and our hardware and pricing are built for sustained operation, not for churn.

For that pattern, use a hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) whose billing and platform are designed for it. When you need a server that runs for a long time at a low price, come back to us.