All servers at ArcadeServers are rented on an hourly model only. You can stop your server at any time — stopping it starts no new hour. Only the hours your server stays online are deducted from your wallet.
What does upfront hour mean?
Each hour is charged at the start of that hour. So if you stop the server mid-hour, you've paid for the hour you're in and it isn't refunded — but the next hour never begins.
We chose this because it's transparent both to calculate and to audit: the panel shows every hour and when it was charged, so you never meet a surprise total.
What happens if your balance runs out?
The prepaid wallet works without surprises: you're warned by email before the balance runs out. If it does run out anyway, the server is put to sleep automatically, and your world files, plugins and configuration are preserved exactly as they were.
Top up and you wake the server with one click, picking up where you left off.
Idle sleep
The most useful part of the hourly model is not paying for hours nobody plays. To make that easy, servers come with idle sleep on by default: with no players for 15 minutes, the server puts itself to sleep.
If you'd rather your server stayed up around the clock, you can turn this off; your preference is stored and never changed back by us.
Prices on every package are shown live in the panel and the store; the price you see is the price you pay. For the details of the model, see the hourly billing guide.
Existing users' balances and servers were unaffected — only the billing model got simpler.