Verification policy

Effective date: October 2, 2026 · Version 1.0

1. Why we verify

Hourly servers are cheap to start and easy to throw away. That makes them useful, and it also makes them attractive for card fraud, spam and attacks. When that happens, honest customers pay for it: stolen cards turn into chargebacks, and abuse puts IP addresses on blocklists that the next customer inherits.

We also have to follow sanctions law. We cannot provide services to people or places under comprehensive US, UN, EU or UK sanctions, as section 13 of our Terms of Service explains.

Verification is how we keep those risks small without asking every customer for paperwork.

2. Checks on every order and top-up

• Fraud screening by our payment processors, for example whether a card has been reported stolen.
• Sanctions screening of your name and country against public sanctions lists.
• Consistency checks by our own systems, for example whether the country of the card, the billing address and the connection roughly match.

These run in the background. When nothing stands out, you will not notice them.

3. When we ask for more

We may ask you to verify before a server is activated or afterward. Typical reasons:

• the payment details, the billing address and the connection point to different countries;
• the email address belongs to a disposable-mail service;
• several accounts appear to belong to the same person;
• a payment failed, was reversed or is disputed;
• a new account tops up an unusually large amount or starts many servers in a short time;
• you ask us to open outbound port 25 for mail, as our Acceptable Use Policy describes;
• we receive abuse reports about your servers;
• your name resembles an entry on a sanctions list and the match needs to be cleared.

A request is not an accusation. Often it simply confirms that everything is in order.

4. What we may ask for

We ask for the least that answers the question, usually one of these:

• confirmation of your email address or contact details;
• proof that you control the card you paid with, for example a photo of the card with all but the last four digits covered, or the statement line that shows the charge;
• proof that you control the wallet a crypto payment came from, for example a message signed with that wallet;
• a government-issued photo ID, when the question is who you are, such as a possible sanctions match or a suspected stolen identity;
• for a business, its registered name and registration number;
• a short description of what you will use the server for, for example before we open port 25.

We never ask for passwords, private keys, seed phrases, or the full number or security code of your card.

Verification requests reach you as a ticket in the customer portal or as an email from an hourlyvps.com address. If a request looks different, do not answer it; forward it to [email protected].

5. How we handle what you send

• Only the people who handle verification and payment fraud can see it.
• Our payment processors may run checks of their own, for which they are responsible themselves, as our Privacy Policy explains.
• Documents you upload are deleted within 90 days after the check is finished. We keep the result with your account data.
• We do not use verification data for marketing.

6. If you do not verify

If you decide not to verify, or a check fails, we may decline the order or suspend the account. If no service was used, we return unused top-ups to the original payment method, unless the law requires us to hold them, for example under sanctions rules or during a fraud investigation. See section 8 of the Refund and Account Credit Policy.

7. Ask a person to review a decision

Automated checks can be wrong. If one stopped your order or top-up, reply to the ticket or write to [email protected] and ask for a review by a person. You can explain your side and send information we did not have. We will tell you the outcome.

8. Why we do not promise “no checks”

Some providers advertise servers with no checks at all. We do not, because a network without checks fills up with abuse, and every customer pays for it through blocklisted addresses and reversed payments. What we do promise is proportion: minimal paperwork, asked for a stated reason, kept for a limited time.

9. Changes and contact

We update this policy when our checks change. The version and effective date are at the top of this page. Questions about a check on your order: [email protected]. Questions about your personal data: [email protected].