We would rather refund somebody who is unhappy than keep money we did not earn. This policy is deliberately more generous than the law requires in most places we sell, and it applies on top of — never instead of — whatever statutory rights you have where you live.
The 72-hour guarantee
Within 72 hours of your first payment for a server, ask and we refund it in full. No reason needed, no argument, no “let us try one more thing first”.
Two limits, both about people who are not really buying a server:
- It applies to your first payment for a given server, not to every renewal of it, and once per customer — not once per server ordered, and not again on a second account.
- It is not available where the account has plainly been used as free hosting rather than tried — tens of gigabytes uploaded, or a full community migrated on and then off inside the window. This is not about a busy launch weekend; it is about the handful of people who do this on purpose.
- It covers the hosting fee. Set-up charges, add-ons bought separately, domain or subdomain registrations and anything we paid a third party for on your behalf are not refundable.
Ask from the panel, or email support@ghostnode.gg. We do not require you to talk to a retention team, because we do not have one.
After 72 hours
We refund, in whole or in part, where something was genuinely wrong on our side:
- Extended downtime beyond what the SLA allows.
- Hardware or network failure that we could not put right in reasonable time.
- A plan that did not provide what it was described as providing.
- A server we could not provision, or could not keep provisioned.
These are usually settled as a pro-rata refund of the affected period, or as account credit if you prefer it — credit is instant and a card refund is not. We do not refund an unused remainder simply because you changed your mind mid-term, though you can cancel at any time to stop the next payment.
Beyond your statutory rights and the 72-hour guarantee, a refund after that point is at our discretion, decided on what actually went wrong. Granting one does not commit us to granting another, and account credit is our default remedy where something is owed.
What is not refunded
- Accounts terminated for a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy. If your server was removed for attacking somebody, the money stays with us.
- Charges already disputed with your bank. Once a chargeback is filed we cannot also refund — that would pay twice. See below.
- Problems with the game, a mod or a script that we did not supply. We will help you fix it, and often can, but a broken third-party resource is not a fault in the hosting.
- Downtime you caused — a configuration that will not boot, a resource that crashes the server, a database somebody dropped.
- Repeated refund requests from the same customer, or a pattern of ordering and refunding, which we treat as abuse of this policy rather than as a series of separate requests.
How to ask, and how long it takes
- Request it from the panel, or email support@ghostnode.gg.
- We reply within one working day, usually much sooner.
- If we approve, the refund goes back to the card you paid with, through Stripe. Card refunds typically take 5 to 10 working days to appear — that is your bank's timing, not ours, and we cannot speed it up.
- We cancel the subscription and schedule the server for deletion 24 hours later rather than immediately, so you have time to pull your files off it. Take them before the day is out.
Every refund is recorded against your account and confirmed by email with the amount and the expected arrival.
Your statutory rights
Nothing above reduces the rights below. Where they give you more than this policy does, take the one that gives you more.
United Kingdom
Under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 you normally have 14 days to cancel a service bought online. Because you asked us at checkout to begin setting your server up immediately — and separately acknowledged that you would lose the right once the service had been fully performed — that right ends when the service has been performed. Those were the two separate, unticked boxes above the pay button, and we keep a record of the exact wording you saw.
If you cancel within the 14 days but after we have started, you are liable for the proportion of the service already supplied and we refund the rest. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 you are separately entitled to a repeat performance or a price reduction if the service was not carried out with reasonable care and skill.
European Economic Area
The same 14-day right of withdrawal applies under the Consumer Rights Directive, and it ends the same way — on full performance, where you expressly requested immediate performance and acknowledged the loss of the right. Where performance has begun but is not complete, you pay for the proportion supplied and we refund the balance. You keep the mandatory consumer protections of the country you live in, which in some member states are more generous than the Directive's minimum; where they are, they apply.
United States
There is generally no statutory cooling-off period for an online service purchase, so what you have is our 72-hour guarantee, which we honour as written. Automatic renewal is disclosed before you pay, we email you before renewals, and you can cancel from the panel at any time in a couple of clicks — which satisfies the automatic renewal laws in California, New York and the other states that have them. Some states give additional rights and nothing here displaces them.
Australia
Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law, including that they will be supplied with due care and skill and be fit for the purpose we described. If there is a major failure you may cancel and get a refund, or seek compensation for a reasonably foreseeable loss. If the failure is not major, you are entitled to have it fixed in a reasonable time, and if we do not, you may cancel and get a refund of the unused part. This policy sits alongside those rights and does not limit them.
New Zealand
If you are a consumer, the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 applies: services must be supplied with reasonable care and skill and be fit for purpose, and you have remedies including cancellation and a refund where they are not. Those rights are not excluded by anything here.
Elsewhere in Asia and Oceania
We apply the consumer rules of your own country where they give you more than this policy — including Singapore's Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act and Japan's consumer legislation. If you think a local rule entitles you to something this page does not offer, say so when you write to us and we will apply it.
Chargebacks
Please talk to us before disputing a charge with your bank. A chargeback costs us a fee on top of the amount, takes months to resolve, and gets you your money more slowly than emailing us would have.
When a dispute is filed we suspend the server immediately and stop the subscription, and we cannot refund on top of the dispute because that would pay you twice. We respond to the bank with the account records, the audit log and the service history. If the dispute is resolved in your favour, that is the end of it. If it is resolved in ours, the balance becomes payable before the account can be used again.
If the charge you are disputing was not yours — a card used fraudulently — write to support@ghostnode.gg and we will refund it and close the account without you needing to involve the bank at all.
Questions
support@ghostnode.gg, or our Discord. If you disagree with a decision we made, say so and a person will look at it again — the complaints route is in the Terms & Conditions.
GhostNode Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17414337. Registered office: 66 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom. General enquiries support@ghostnode.gg; anything about personal data dpo@ghostnode.gg.