Vultr refunded me for "too much" uptime

frankfurt_ops · 2026-01-22T01:10:47+00:00

I must share a strange Incident with my Vultr Virtual Server. In January my Invoice showed a Credit of 4.87 US-Dollars with Description "SLA Uptime Exceeded." This puzzled me greatly. I opened a Ticke...

steveipw

Member

Joined:: Jun 2024
Posts:: 163
From:: Denver, US

7mo ago · edited

#11

GeorgeNmp said:

A bare metal box could be getting real money

That is exactly what I would worry about. The bigger the credit, the more likely a human eventually notices. My cross-connect story started at 47 dollars a month and ended with a 2,200 dollar demand letter.

Frankfurt_ops, what is your plan tier? If it is under 10 dollars a month I would almost ignore it. If you are running their 120 dollar optimization tier, start a clawback reserve fund yesterday.

zfs send | zfs receive. repeat.

frankfurt_ops

Member OP

Joined:: May 2024
Posts:: 104
From:: Frankfurt, Germany

7mo ago · edited

#12

It is the 6 Dollar Cloud Compute Plan with 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM. The Credit of 5.12 Dollars is nearly a full Month free. The Math appears to be: (Uptime Percentage minus 99.99) multiplied by Monthly Cost, then multiplied by some Constant. December was 99.997 Percent, January was 99.998 Percent. The Credit grew slightly.

olya

Member

Always Free

Joined:: Jun 2024
Posts:: 159
From:: Warsaw, PL

7mo ago · edited

#13

frankfurt_ops said:

Multiplied by some Constant

This is the kind of thing that makes me glad I only run free tier. Oracle can delete my account tomorrow and I have lost nothing but time.

But seriously, a nearly-free month on a 6 dollar plan? That constant must be enormous. Either someone set it to 1000x by mistake, or this was a genuine loyalty program that made sense at higher price points and became absurd at the bottom tier.

I checked the Wayback Machine for Vultr promo pages from 2019-2021. Found nothing about uptime bonuses. Their marketing from that era was all about "100% SSD" and "16 locations." This clause may be even older than we think.

licensing is a suggestion

ME

mediadhifi

Member

Joined:: Sep 2024
Posts:: 6
From:: Milan, Italy

7mo ago · edited

#14

I run a small VPS with Vultr in Amsterdam for my media streaming tests. Never seen this credit. My uptime is usually 99.99+ as well. Maybe it is region-specific or account-age-specific? I signed up in 2023.

Frankfurt_ops, when exactly did you create your account?

frankfurt_ops

Member OP

Joined:: May 2024
Posts:: 104
From:: Frankfurt, Germany

7mo ago · edited

#15

March 2021. There was a Promo Code "VULTR2021" for 100 Dollar Credit over 12 Months. I used that. Perhaps the Inverted SLA was bundled with that Campaign.

haroldgsm

Member

Grumpy Old Sysadmin

Joined:: May 2024
Posts:: 329
From:: Ohio, US

7mo ago · edited

2 #16

2021 promo code explains it. Those were desperate customer-acquisition days for every provider. I was at a host in Ohio that briefly offered "negative downtime insurance" where if your site stayed up we paid you. Marketing loved it. Finance killed it in 90 days. The code stayed in billing for 18 months and cost us six figures before we found it.

Vultr is bigger and slower. Could easily be 4 years of drift.

IPv4, IRC, and irssi — fight me

jane_ffm

Member

Joined:: May 2024
Posts:: 194
From:: Frankfurt, DE

7mo ago · edited

#17

haroldgsm said:

The code stayed in billing for 18 months

This tracks with what I saw in support. Billing system migrations at scale often orphan these promo hooks because the new system maps them as generic "credit rules" without context. The rule keeps firing because nobody knows what it does, and it does not show up on standard audit reports because it is technically a valid credit type.

Frankfurt_ops, I would suggest one more check: log into your Vultr panel and see if there is any "Active Promotions" or "Legacy Rewards" section that lists this. If it is visible to you, it is visible to them if they ever look. If it is invisible, it is a true ghost.

Single mode till I die 💀

frankfurt_ops

Member OP

Joined:: May 2024
Posts:: 104
From:: Frankfurt, Germany

7mo ago · edited

4 #18

I checked. There is no visible Promotion or Reward listed in my Panel. The Credit simply appears on the Invoice as a negative Line Item. It is a Ghost.

SamAlvi

Member

Self-Host Everything

Joined:: Jun 2024
Posts:: 188
From:: Portland, US

7mo ago · edited

#19

frankfurt_ops said:

It is a Ghost.

And this is exactly why I self-host. Not because I am paranoid, but because I want causality. Every number on my invoice traces to a decision I made. There are no ghosts, no legacy cron jobs written by departed engineers, no marketing campaigns that outlived their product managers.

You are all analyzing this like archaeologists. "Maybe 2019, maybe 2021, maybe a migration." I do not have to do archaeology on my own infrastructure. That is the point.

my cloud. my rules. my 3AM alerts.

wendy

Member

Joined:: Jun 2024
Posts:: 164
From:: Manchester, UK

7mo ago

4 #20

SamAlvi said:

I do not have to do archaeology on my own infrastructure

You do archaeology on your own time instead. I have read your posts. You spend more hours tuning docker-compose than most people spend on actual server administration. Different trade, same shovel.

Frankfurt_ops is getting free money for doing nothing. You are doing something for free money you already spent on hardware. Neither is wrong. Let the man enjoy his ghost.

Have you tried restarting it?

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