Short answer: yes, in almost every case. A VPS stops costing money when you destroy it, not when you power it off. The meter is tied to the resource existing, not to the resource working, and all three providers we read on 2026-10-28 say so in their own documentation.
Whether the meter runs is one question, the rate it runs at is another — the monthly cost of a running VPS answers the second.
This is the question that decides whether a “$4 a month” test box costs $4 or $40: what happens to the invoice on the days you are not using it. It is also the question the three sites ranking for vps price never answer — across the 30 pages we catalogued for this cycle, the words “stopped” and “powered off” appear on none of them. So we went to the billing documentation instead of the marketing pages, on 2026-10-28, and pulled the clauses out verbatim.
Vendors use “stopped” for at least three different things, and the invoice consequence is different for each. This table is the whole article in one screen:
| State | What it means | DigitalOcean | Hetzner Cloud | OVHcloud VPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Powered off | Shut down from the panel; disk and IP still allocated | Still billed | Still billed | Still billed (subscription) |
| Suspended | Provider shuts it down for you over an unpaid balance | Resources powered down, balance still owed | Not described on the pages we read | Not described on the pages we read |
| Destroyed / deleted | Resource removed from the account | Billing ends | Billing ends | At the end of the paid term |
Sources, all fetched on 2026-10-28: docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/details/pricing/ and docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/late-payments/; docs.hetzner.com/cloud/billing/faq/; docs.ovhcloud.com VPS FAQ, the cancellation guide and the commitments guide. Where a cell says the behaviour is not described, the page we fetched did not state it and we did not infer it from a forum post.
DigitalOcean is the most explicit of the three, and the sentence is worth reading twice because it names the mechanism:
“Reserved on the hypervisor” is the reason, and it is a real one: from the host's point of view your RAM is allocated whether or not your kernel is running, so a shut-down Droplet still occupies capacity that cannot be sold twice. The same page repeats the rule for the GPU line, in case the CPU wording left room for doubt: “Powering off a GPU Droplet does not stop billing. To end billing, destroy the GPU Droplet.”
Hetzner reaches the same place from the other direction. Its Cloud billing FAQ does not use the phrase “powered off” at all; it makes the server itself the unit of billing: “We will bill you for each cloud server until you choose to delete them. Even if you aren't actively using your server, we will bill you for it.” It then states the arithmetic it applies: the bill is the lower of the monthly price cap or the hourly price multiplied by hours used, and “we always round up the hourly usage of a server.”
OVHcloud does not have this problem because it does not sell VPS by the hour on the page we read. VPS-1 through VPS-4 are listed as “Starting at $4.54 /month” through “Starting at $23.37 /month”, and the cancellation guide defines what stopping means: termination “implies that it will be permanently discontinued at the end of the current subscription.” Power state is not an input to the invoice, so a VPS that has been off for three weeks costs exactly what it would have cost running.
Suspension is the state people confuse with cancellation, because the server is off and the panel is locked — it looks finished. DigitalOcean's Late Payments page lays out three stages, and only the third one ends anything:
Two details on that page are more useful than the stages themselves. First: “How fast an account moves between past due, suspension, and permanent deletion depends on the account. DigitalOcean does not publish fixed timelines for these stages.” Anyone quoting you “you get 14 days before deletion” is quoting something that is not on the page. Second: paying does not restore service by itself — “once you pay a past-due balance, you need to manually turn your resources (like Droplets) back on using the control panel.”
For Hetzner and OVHcloud we could not find an equivalent published suspension timeline on the pages we fetched, so this article does not state one. What OVHcloud does publish is the commitment mechanic, which is where a “stopped” server can become genuinely expensive: commitments on VPS and Dedicated Servers are “billed annually and up front only,” and “once you have a commitment in place, you can only cancel it early by paying the remainder of what you owe on the commitment.” Powering the VPS off under a 24-month commitment does not reduce that remainder by a cent.
Destruction ends billing at all three, but each has a floor, and the floors are measured in different units — 60 seconds at one provider, one whole hour at another, a subscription term at the third:
| Provider | Billing increment | Floor on a very short-lived server | Monthly ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean — bundled CPU | Per second | 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher | 672 hours (28 days) |
| DigitalOcean — v5 configuration | Per second | 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher | No cap — billed on actual hours |
| Hetzner Cloud | Per hour, always rounded up | One whole hour | Monthly price cap |
| OVHcloud VPS | Subscription term | No hourly option on the page we read | Monthly price, fixed |
The DigitalOcean row for v5 configurations is the one that changes how you should think about “stopped”. On v5 the page says plainly: “Unlike bundled plans, v5 Droplets do not have a monthly usage cap.” You are billed per second at a rate that is the sum of the configured resources — shared vCPU at $0.0158219 per vCPU-hour, memory at $0.0040411 per GiB-hour, boot disk at $0.000137 per GiB-hour. The 672-hour ceiling that protects a bundled plan does not exist there, so a v5 box left running all month costs more in a 31-day month than in a 30-day one, and the page says so: “The monthly total for a continuously running v5 Droplet varies based on the number of hours in the month.” Which side of that line a Droplet sits on is decided by plan family, not by price: DigitalOcean's pricing docs cap “Bundled-plan CPU Droplets” at 672 hours and its plan docs say “There are five bundled Droplet plans: one shared CPU plan and four dedicated CPU plans,” while the pricing FAQ describes Bundled Plans as having “fixed vCPU, memory, and storage ratios” and v5 Droplets as the tier where you “configure vCPU, memory, and storage independently” — which is why the 672-hour ceiling binds the first group and not the second.
Hetzner's floor is the opposite kind of trap. A server created to test a deploy and deleted after four minutes is billed one hour, not four minutes — the FAQ gives the reason in the provider's own words: “When you created the server, it placed an additional load on our systems.” DigitalOcean's floor is 60 seconds or one cent, so the same test costs $0.01.
Take the most common shape: a server that runs for seven days and then sits idle for the rest of the month because nobody remembered to delete it. Using only published rates, here is what each billing model does.
| Model | Hours you used | Hours you are billed for | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean bundled, destroyed on day 7 | 168 | 168 | Per-second billing stops at destruction |
| DigitalOcean bundled, powered off on day 7 | 168 | 672 (the cap) | Billing ends at destruction, not at shutdown |
| DigitalOcean v5, powered off on day 7 | 168 | No cap — up to 720 in a 30-day month | No monthly ceiling on v5 configurations |
| Hetzner, deleted on day 7 | 168 | 168 (rounded up to the hour) | Bill is the lower of cap or hourly × hours |
| OVHcloud VPS-1, off from day 7 | 168 | The full month, $4.54 | Monthly subscription; power state is not billed |
The gap between the two lines is the whole point of the article: the orange server and the blue server were doing the same work for the same seven days. The difference is a delete call nobody made.
If you only keep three figures from this page, keep these, because they are the ones that decide whether an idle server costs cents or the full monthly price:
Two more published details belong in the same note because they survive the server itself. At Hetzner, primary IP addresses are billed separately from cloud servers and “we will bill you for all Primary IPs that have finished the creation process, including Primary IPs that are not assigned to any cloud server” — if you want to stop paying for one, you have to delete it. Primary IPv6 addresses are free and generally do not appear on the invoice. At DigitalOcean, public IPv4 addresses on v5 configurations are a separate invoice line whose “introductory line-item price is currently $0.00 but is subject to change.” A destroyed server can therefore leave a small line item behind if you forget the IP.
At DigitalOcean, yes, for bundled-plan CPU Droplets. Its Droplet pricing documentation states: “Billing begins when you create the Droplet and ends when you destroy it. You are still billed for bundled-plan CPU Droplets that are powered off because the compute resources stay reserved on the hypervisor. To end billing, destroy the Droplet.” Hetzner's Cloud billing FAQ says it will bill each cloud server “until you choose to delete them” and that “even if you aren't actively using your server, we will bill you for it.” An OVHcloud VPS is sold as a monthly subscription, and its cancellation guide states that termination means the service is permanently discontinued at the end of the current subscription, so powering it off changes nothing on the invoice.
At DigitalOcean, destruction is the event that ends billing, but there is a floor: the minimum charge is 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher, and a Droplet destroyed in under 60 seconds is still charged that minimum. Hetzner bills in whole hours and always rounds up, so a server that exists for a few minutes is billed for one full hour. At OVHcloud the service is a subscription, so cancelling sets an end date at the close of the current subscription rather than stopping the charge the same day.
DigitalOcean's billing help answers the refund question in three words: “We do not offer refunds.” It also states that it does not offer payment extensions. Hetzner's model avoids the question by billing the lower of the monthly cap or the hourly rate times hours used, so deleting a server mid-month produces a smaller invoice rather than a refund. OVHcloud's VPS FAQ says moving remaining subscription time from an old VPS to a new one, or getting it refunded, is “generally possible but the process requires a request to our support team” — a case-by-case request, not a published policy.
DigitalOcean's Late Payments documentation describes three stages. A past due account is placed on hold, which blocks new resources while existing resources continue to run. A suspended account has its resources powered down and logins redirected to the payment page. If the balance stays unresolved, resources may be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. The page states plainly that DigitalOcean does not publish fixed timelines for these stages, and that after paying a past-due balance you must manually turn the resources back on.
“Stopped” is not a billing state. Powering a VPS off is an operating-system action; destroying it is an account action, and only the second one reaches the meter. The three providers differ in how they measure the time — per second with a one-cent floor at DigitalOcean, whole rounded hours at Hetzner, a fixed subscription month at OVHcloud — but none of them prices a server by whether it is awake. If you are running a test box, the delete button is the only cost control that works; if you are running something you plan to keep, the 672-hour cap and the v5 no-cap rule are the two lines in the price list that will decide the invoice. For the rest of the arithmetic behind a VPS bill, see how a VPS price is assembled and what a “from $4” plan actually buys.