Not a content-marketing exercise. Every entry here exists because somebody asked it, usually more than once, and the answer was worth writing down properly.
Use the browser KVM console in the control panel — it attaches to the virtual machine's display and keyboard directly, so it works regardless of firewall rules, sshd configuration or network state. From there log in at the console with the root password, fix the problem, and reload sshd. If you have also lost the root password, boot into single-user mode by editing the GRUB entry from the same console and appending "init=/bin/bash" to the kernel line.
The root password is shown once, in the deployment email sent to the address on the order, and is never stored in retrievable form afterwards. If you have lost it, reset it from the control panel — the reset takes effect on the next reboot. If you supplied an SSH key at checkout, no root password was generated at all, because password authentication is disabled on first boot in that case.
The KVM console is in the control panel under your server, and opens in the browser with no plugin or client required. It gives you the virtual machine's display and keyboard from before the bootloader onwards, which means you can interrupt GRUB, boot rescue media, watch the kernel boot, and fix a broken network configuration. It works when SSH does not, which is precisely when you need it.
The key must be an OpenSSH-format public key, on one line, beginning with ssh-ed25519, ssh-rsa or ecdsa-sha2-nistp256. The two most common mistakes are pasting the private key instead of the public one — the public key is the file ending in .pub — and pasting a PuTTY-format key, which uses a multi-line format with a header. Convert a PuTTY key with PuTTYgen's "Export OpenSSH key" option, or run: ssh-keygen -i -f puttykey.pub.
No. Invoices are valid for 90 minutes, and Bitcoin in particular can exceed that with a low fee. The funds arrive at the payment processor regardless. Open a ticket with the transaction hash and we match the payment to the order manually — this is routine and usually resolved within the hour. To avoid it next time, pay in USDT on TRC-20, Monero, Litecoin, Solana or Tron, all of which confirm in under three minutes.
Invoices carry a 2.5% tolerance, so a shortfall caused by network fees settles normally and your server deploys. Below that threshold the payment is held rather than silently kept, and support will either request the difference or refund what you sent — your choice. Nothing is confiscated for underpayment.
Yes. By default the surplus is credited to your service and applied against the next renewal, which is what most customers prefer. If you would rather have it back, open a ticket with a destination address and we refund it within three business days, less the network fee. It does not have to be the address that sent the payment.
Cryptocurrency payments are push transactions and cannot be pulled, so nothing charges you automatically. Renewal notices go out 7 days, 3 days and 1 day before expiry, each containing a payment link for the exact amount due. If payment has not confirmed by the expiry date the server is suspended but preserved, and data is retained for a further 7 days during which paying restores it intact. There are no late fees. You can also pre-pay credit and let renewals draw down from the balance.
Yes. Every payment generates a downloadable PDF invoice in the control panel showing the amount in USD, the cryptocurrency and quantity paid, the transaction reference, the service description and the period covered. You can add a company name and address to the invoice yourself in the panel — we do not verify it and it is not stored against your account for any other purpose.
Steal time is the percentage of time your vCPU was ready to run but the hypervisor scheduled a different guest. Under 1% is a healthy node. Sustained figures above 5% mean the node needs rebalancing, and we want to know — open a ticket with the output of "vmstat 1 30" and we will either migrate you to a less loaded node or move the noisy neighbour. Compute nodes are provisioned at a maximum of 3:1 vCPU to physical thread, so sustained high steal is a fault rather than a design.
Use fio with direct I/O, not dd. A representative test: fio --name=rand --ioengine=libaio --rw=randread --bs=4k --numjobs=4 --size=1G --runtime=30 --time_based --group_reporting --direct=1. Expect well above 100,000 random 4K read IOPS on an NVMe compute node. dd measures sequential throughput through the page cache and will report numbers that have no bearing on how a database behaves.
A single TCP stream is limited by the bandwidth-delay product and by any congested hop between you and the server, not by the port speed. Test with multiple parallel streams — "aria2c -x8 -s8" — before concluding there is a problem. If multi-stream throughput is also low, run "mtr --report --report-cycles 50" to the server and open a ticket with the output; loss at the final hop is a real problem and we will look at it.
Your port is throttled to 10 Mbps for the remainder of the billing month. NimbusVPS does not bill overage charges and does not suspend for transfer, because an unexpected four-figure invoice is worse than a slow month. Lift the throttle at any time by adding transfer in the panel at $1.50 per TB, or by switching the server to unmetered for a flat $24 per month.
Yes. All plans use full KVM virtualisation with your own kernel, so Docker, Podman, containerd and Kubernetes all work without special configuration. Nested virtualisation is also enabled, which means you can run KVM guests inside your VPS or use tools that require it. Shared-kernel container platforms — where Docker would be a problem — are not sold here.
Upload the ISO from the control panel under your server's media section, attach it to the virtual optical drive, then reboot with boot order set to CD first. The KVM console gives you full boot-time access so you can drive the installer. Any x86-64 operating system works — including Windows, pfSense, OPNsense, TrueNAS, Proxmox and Whonix. There is no charge for this.
Yes. Windows Server 2022 Standard is $8 per month and Windows Server 2025 Standard is $9 per month, licence included. Both require at least 4 GB of RAM and 60 GB of disk, and the configurator enforces those minimums automatically when you select them. Remote Desktop is enabled on first boot; we recommend restricting it to your own address range in the firewall rather than leaving it open.
Use the rebuild function in the control panel or the API endpoint POST /v1/servers/{id}/rebuild. Reinstalls are free and unlimited, take about 60 seconds, and you can switch to a different operating system in the process. Everything on the disk is destroyed — take a snapshot first if there is anything you want to keep, because the erase is not reversible.
Check "ip -6 addr show" for an assigned address and "ip -6 route show" for a default route. Most templates configure the first address automatically; if yours did not, the /64 and gateway are shown in the control panel and can be configured through netplan or systemd-networkd. The most common cause of intermittent IPv6 failure is a firewall blocking all ICMPv6 — that breaks neighbour discovery and path MTU discovery, and produces symptoms that look nothing like a firewall problem.
Tor exit relays are permitted in the Netherlands, Iceland, Romania and Moldova, and not permitted in the United States location. Relays and bridges, which do not carry exit traffic, are permitted everywhere. Enable the free "Tor relay allowance" toggle at checkout or in the panel so our abuse desk knows the server is a relay and handles the resulting reports correctly — flagging it in advance is what stops a routine complaint from becoming a suspension.
Port 25 is open by default on all plans and running a mail server is explicitly permitted. Reverse DNS is configurable in the panel at no charge, and we will help with deliverability if you ask. The one thing that gets you removed is unsolicited bulk mail. A new IP has no sending reputation with the large providers, so ramp volume gradually over two to three weeks rather than sending ten thousand messages on day one.
Proof-of-work mining is not permitted on shared VPS hardware, for the ordinary reason that sustained full-CPU load degrades every other guest on the node. It is permitted on dedicated servers, where the hardware is yours. Running full nodes, Lightning routing nodes, validators, staking infrastructure and RPC endpoints is permitted everywhere and is one of the more common workloads on the platform.
Usually not. The majority of abuse we see involves compromised servers rather than malicious customers, and where the ongoing harm allows it you get a description of what we observed and 48 hours to remediate. Where the attack is actively causing damage we may null-route the affected port immediately and tell you afterwards. Reinstall rather than clean — a compromised system cannot be trusted to report its own state, and reinstalls are free.
We respond only to legally valid orders from a court with jurisdiction over the datacenter holding the server. Informal requests by email, foreign agency enquiries that have not gone through mutual legal assistance, and civil demands without a court order are refused and logged. Where a valid order arrives we comply with what it actually compels, which — given we hold an email address and a transaction reference — is usually very little. Affected customers are notified unless the order prohibits it. Counts go in the transparency report once a quarter closes — the first one has not, so that page currently shows the method and an empty table.
Cancel from the control panel at any time; it takes effect immediately and the disks are securely erased. Within 7 days of first deployment the 7-day money-back guarantee applies and you get the full amount back to a cryptocurrency address you nominate. After that, no refund is due for the current term unless the fault is ours, and simply not renewing is usually the sensible option since there is nothing to unsubscribe from. Entry plans start at $2.90 per month, so an unused month is not a large exposure.
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