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Contabo deleted my VPS 2 days before a written payment deadline — Team Lead confirms it
huckleberry
Member
I would like to ask the LowEndTalk community for an independent opinion regarding a serious issue I am currently having with Contabo.
I had a Contabo Cloud VPS 10 SSD hosting a substantial part of CoreLink Network Solutions, a complete Network Operations Center (NOC) platform that I had been designing and developing for approximately three months.
This was not a simple website or a basic web application. CoreLink is designed to centralize infrastructure management, equipment management, network supervision, monitoring and incident management.
My regular payment became overdue on August 4, 2026 because my payment card had expired. I contacted Contabo Support and explained the situation.
Contabo Support subsequently granted me a payment deferral until August 19, 2026.
Their representative explicitly wrote:
“I have granted a 7-day payment deferral until August 19, 2026, to give you more time to settle the outstanding balance. This will ensure that your server is not deleted.”
I relied on this written confirmation.
On August 17, 2026, two days before the granted deadline, I attempted to resolve the outstanding payment.
Instead, I discovered that my VPS and associated services had already been permanently deleted.
I contacted Contabo Support and requested an explanation and recovery of the data.
The response from a Contabo Support Team Lead is particularly important. He explicitly acknowledged:
“the system deleted the server on August 17, 2026 as the standard procedure, despite the payment deferral that had been granted until August 19, 2026.”
So the timeline is:
August 4 — Payment due / service suspended
August 11 — Payment deferral granted until August 19
August 17 — VPS permanently deleted
August 17 — Payment settlement attempted / support contacted
August 18 — Contabo Team Lead confirmed deletion occurred despite the granted payment deferral
I fully acknowledge that my payment was overdue. I am not disputing the original payment obligation or the suspension of the service.
My complaint is specifically about the fact that Contabo Support granted me a written payment deferral and explicitly stated that this would ensure that the server would not be deleted.
The VPS contained approximately three months of intensive development work for CoreLink, including application code, infrastructure management, equipment management, network monitoring components, monitoring integrations, configurations, secure VPN connectivity, alerting, dashboards and deployment work.
This was not simply a lost VPS. A substantial part of a complete NOC platform and its development environment was hosted there.
Contabo has stated that the data cannot be recovered because they do not keep backups of the servers.
As a goodwill gesture, Contabo offered:
- one free month on a new VPS, or
- a refund of my last payment.
I declined these options because neither option restores the deleted data or approximately three months of development work.
I also acknowledge that I should have maintained an independent backup outside the provider. That was my mistake, and I have learned that lesson.
However, I would like to understand how the community views the separate issue of a provider granting a written payment deferral and explicitly stating that the server would not be deleted, followed by deletion two days before that deadline.
What would you consider a reasonable resolution in this situation?
I would particularly appreciate feedback from experienced hosting customers, providers, sysadmins and anyone who has dealt with similar VPS/payment disputes.
I have preserved the complete correspondence and can provide screenshots of the relevant communications if needed.
I am deliberately keeping this post factual and am not making any legal conclusion about Contabo’s liability. I am looking for independent opinions and advice.
Tickets: #16240362722 / #16240377244
What would you do in this situation?
Comments
Making a LET thread.
There's nothing more you can do, the data is gone for good. You just have to accept it as a lesson to 1) be diligent on your payment methods and 2) keep an offsite backup for important data. Take the 1-month free on a new VPS and try to recreate your lost work.
I understand your point, and I agree with both lessons.
1) I should have had a more robust payment method in place.
2) I should absolutely have maintained an independent offsite backup.
I take responsibility for both.
However, I don’t think the situation can be reduced entirely to those two points.
The reason I am raising this publicly is that Contabo Support gave me a written payment deferral until August 19, and explicitly stated:
“This will ensure that your server is not deleted.”
The VPS was then deleted on August 17.
More importantly, Contabo’s own Team Lead subsequently acknowledged that the deletion occurred “despite the payment deferral that had been granted until August 19, 2026.”
So yes, I have learned the backup lesson — and I will never rely on a single VPS as the only copy of important infrastructure again.
But I am also trying to understand how a written payment deferral should be treated when the provider’s own system deletes the server before the agreed deadline.
As for the one-month free VPS, I appreciate the gesture, but the problem is that the VPS itself is not what I lost. I lost approximately three months of development work on CoreLink, a complete NOC platform that was already being used commercially by a paying customer.
A new empty VPS can replace the infrastructure. It cannot replace the development work that was deleted.
I’m not expecting anyone here to magically recover the data. I’m trying to determine whether Contabo’s proposed resolution is reasonable given the circumstances.
I appreciate your advice, though. The backup lesson has definitely been learned — the hard way.
Your AI slop is not worth anything, just generate it again if you didn't bother with even the most basic of git push
Yes. I created the thread to get an independent perspective from the hosting community, especially people who have dealt with similar VPS deletion or billing situations.
Calling it “AI slop” doesn’t really address the issue.
CoreLink wasn’t just a collection of source files. It was a complete NOC environment involving application code, server configuration, Docker, LibreNMS, Uptime Kuma, WireGuard, network configuration, monitoring integrations, databases, deployment work and operational configuration.
And yes, in hindsight, I absolutely should have had an external Git repository and independent backups. I take responsibility for that.
But “just generate it again” is not how infrastructure development works. Recreating the code is only one part of rebuilding the environment, integrations, configurations, monitoring architecture and months of debugging and testing.
I’m not claiming that my work is irreplaceable. I’m saying that recreating three months of development work has a real cost in time and engineering effort.
The Git/backup lesson has already been learned. The separate question remains: why was the VPS deleted on August 17 when Contabo Support had explicitly granted a payment deferral until August 19 and stated that the server would not be deleted?
Those are two different issues.
Sigh and restore from my daily incremental backups to a new VPS.
I wish it were that simple.
I agree that I should have maintained an independent off-site backup strategy, and I take responsibility for that.
However, there is an additional point that I am currently clarifying with Contabo: I actually had their Auto Backup add-on associated with this VPS.
My account records show an “Auto Backup [Cloud VPS 10]” subscription for the affected VPS.
So my current question to Contabo is not simply “why didn’t I make my own backups?”
It is:
What happened to the Auto Backup data associated with my VPS when the VPS was deleted?
I’m waiting for Contabo to provide a specific answer to that question.
If the backup was available, obviously the whole situation could potentially be very different.
I had my own strange experience with Contabo as well. I posted about it here on LowEndTalk:
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/197431/contabo-strange-behavior/p1?new=1
After that experience, my advice is simple: move your important services away from Contabo while you still can.
Thanks for sharing this. I appreciate it.
My situation is obviously different from yours, but it is useful to hear from another long-time Contabo user who has had an unusual experience with them.
In my case, my immediate priority is still to establish exactly what happened to my VPS and, especially, to the Auto Backup that was associated with it.
I’m documenting everything and will make sure that, whatever the outcome, I never again keep a production environment dependent on a single provider.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Snapshots are intended to make it easier for you to perform a roll-back if you fuck up your system, nothing else. When your VPS is destroyed, it is destroyed. That's normal and expected. In fact, it's even required. This is because the "backups" are nothing more than a point-in-time copy-on-write snapshot of your disk state. A delta (list of differences) of the snapshot and your current disk state, if you will. Without your VPS' original disk, the snapshots are useless.
The only issue on Contabo's side is not honoring their promise to extend the payment deadline.
As for your particular case, I think what may have happened is something like this: since Contabo has a large support/technical staff, someone probably saw that the payment was overdue, didn't pay attention to the payment deferral and simply deleted the entire VM without checking the previous agreement.
Of course, this is just my personal opinion about what might have happened, but the fact remains that you were given a written extension until August 19, and the VM was deleted on August 17.
You’re probably right regarding snapshots. However, I think there is an important distinction in my case: I had Contabo’s separate Auto Backup add-on enabled for this VPS.
Contabo’s own documentation describes Auto Backup as daily backups stored off-server on a separate Contabo storage system, specifically so that data loss on the VPS host does not affect the backups.
Their documentation also states that Auto Backups are retained for 10 days and can be restored through the Customer Control Panel.
So I’m not arguing that a normal VPS snapshot should survive deletion of the VPS.
My question to Contabo is specifically what happened to the Auto Backup data associated with my VPS, and whether a backup existed when the VPS was deleted on August 17.
If Contabo confirms that the Auto Backup was active but that all associated backups were also deleted when the VPS was terminated, I would like to understand the technical and contractual basis for that.
And yes, I fully agree with your last point: the written payment deferral is the central issue in my case. Contabo Support explicitly told me that the deferral until August 19 would ensure that the server would not be deleted, yet the server was deleted on August 17. Their own Team Lead subsequently acknowledged that this happened “despite the payment deferral”.
I’m therefore trying to separate two issues: my failure to maintain an independent backup, which I accept responsibility for, and Contabo’s handling of the written payment deferral and the Auto Backup service I had purchased.
Zero backup == Zero worth
There don't need to be any technical or contractual basis for that. A VPS being deleted for any reason (such as cancellation, termination, overdue payment, etc.) likely just runs a script that cleans up all relevant resources. I highly doubt it explicitly preserves some information just in case someone's data is deleted for an overdue payment that should have been extended but wasn't. The auto-backup issue is a red herring. I'd expect that nearly every host here would do the same that they did.
The one and only problem here is that they made a mistake and did not extend the deadline despite telling you they would. There's no recourse other than what you're doing now, and Contabo has already acknowledged the mistake and offered you compensation (even if they couldn't undo the damage, it's still compensation).
Exactly. When youre working on an important project, you should always keep a backup on a local drive and preferably, another backup in the cloud as well.”
I agree with your last point, and this is actually where I am focusing my case now.
I fully accept the backup lesson. I should have maintained an independent off-site backup and an external Git repository. That was my mistake.
Regarding the Auto Backup, I agree that I should not assume that a backup necessarily survives termination of a VPS. I have asked Contabo for clarification, but I am not relying on that as my main argument.
The central issue is the payment deferral.
Contabo Support explicitly told me that I had until August 19 and that this would ensure that my server would not be deleted.
The VPS was nevertheless deleted on August 17.
More importantly, Contabo’s own Team Lead subsequently acknowledged that the deletion happened “despite the payment deferral that had been granted until August 19, 2026.”
So I am not disputing Contabo’s right to require payment or even to suspend the service. My issue is that I relied on a specific written assurance from their support and the service was nevertheless permanently deleted before the deadline they gave me.
Whether that ultimately gives rise to a legal claim is something I am still determining. For now, I am simply asking Contabo to provide a reasonable resolution for the consequences of that mistake.
And yes, lesson learned: production data will never again exist in only one place.
You have no legal claim unless they changed the ToS. That is what is binding, not whatever some support staff says in a reply to a ticket. If the ToS says they can delete your server for over-payment, that's all that will matter in front of a judge.