Hostwinds Specs (2026): Unmanaged vs Managed, the 3 Mbps Overage Cap, and the 72-Hour Refund

An earlier version of this URL ranked Dallas against Seattle with CPU, disk and network scores framed as this site's own tests. None of those figures were measured here, and they have been removed.

1. The ten unmanaged Linux tiers

Hostwinds prints one unmanaged Linux ladder, ten steps, in US dollars, monthly. Listed fees "do not include any sales, use, revenue, excise, or other taxes." Every row on that page also carries the same feature chips: 1 Gbps ports, Solid State Drives, snapshots, a 99.9999% Uptime badge, and "Custom ISO's".

Unmanaged Linux has one 1 GB step, at $4.99. Transfer scales with the tier rather than with CPU: 1 TB at 1 GB, 2 TB from 2 GB through 6 GB, then 3 TB, 4 TB, 5 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB and 9 TB at the top. Snapshots are listed as included. Nightly backups are a separate product; the managed Linux FAQ prices them at "$1 a month + $0.03 per GB". Extra disks are sold as volumes, billed on the block-storage page at $0.000042386 per GB per hour, and the unmanaged Linux copy describes them as "perfect for low IOPs storage, such as storing large media assets."

The support line is the reason to pause on this table. The unmanaged Linux FAQ states: "Unmanaged VPS services do not come with any technical, management, or administrative support." Hostwinds still lists 24/7/365 live chat and tickets on all hosting, a sales phone number ((888) 404-1279) marked 24/7, and billing hours of Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM PST. On unmanaged, those channels stop at hardware, network and power. The cloud-server overview says unmanaged plans "receive zero support assistance from Hostwinds staff" and that "self-support is the only way to fix any issues you encounter." A kernel that will not boot, or an SSH daemon that stops answering, is the customer's problem unless the plan is upgraded to managed.

2. Managed Linux: two prices, and what the extra money buys

This is the turn. The unmanaged $4.99 plan is not the Hostwinds product that includes operating-system help. Managed Linux uses the same CPU, memory, disk and transfer figures as unmanaged at each size, at a higher price, and the page prints two numbers on every row.

Hostwinds' own ordering tutorial says what the pair means: "Any new service that you order will have a discount on the first invoice." Then: "The regular price will take effect on the second invoice." The 1 GB order button is $7.14; the list figure next to it is $10.99. Use $10.99 for a month-two budget unless checkout shows a different second-invoice amount. The same tutorial tells current customers to watch anniversary billing dates, because a first invoice can be prorated onto the account's recurring due date.

What the extra money is for is written on the support page, not the price table. Managed Services examples include operating-system updates or reinstallation, virus scans, boot failures, password resets, DNS and firewall setup, and package installs via yum or apt-get. The managed Linux FAQ adds "24/7/365 support via Live Chat and support tickets" and a "99.9999% network uptime guarantee" plus a "99.9999% power uptime guarantee." That last pair is the SLA, not the marketing chip: the SLA page says the promise is network and power "with no downtime in excess of 31.6 seconds per year," that credit is a whole day on a ticket, and that maintenance, third-party blocking and the customer's own configuration are excluded. The badge on the plan page does not repeat those conditions.

The rest of the managed Linux ladder (6 GB through 96 GB) follows the same two-price pattern on that page and is not copied here. Windows is a fourth ladder. Unmanaged Windows, license included, starts at the three sizes below. Managed Windows 1 GB prints $22.99 and $14.94. The Windows VPS FAQ lists Microsoft Windows Server 2012, 2016 or 2019. The same page is also the only Hostwinds plan page read for this one that names a CPU vendor: "Windows runs great on Intel, which is why we always deploy the latest and greatest hardware with Intel CPU's." That sentence is not on the Linux pages.

3. The same specs, billed by the hour

Hostwinds' cloud-servers page reprints the unmanaged Linux sizes with hourly rates: $0.006931 an hour at 1 GB, $0.013875 at 2 GB, then $0.026375, $0.040264, $0.054153, $0.069431, $0.106931, $0.173597, $0.298597 and $0.456931 at 96 GB. The cloud-server overview says "All of our cloud hosting options have the choice to be billed hourly" and that billing stops when the server is cancelled. Hourly invoices are due the first of the month for the previous month's usage; unpaid hourly services risk suspension after one day and termination after ten.

The 1 GB hourly rate times 720 hours (30 times 24) is $4.99032, which is arithmetic on the printed rate, not a billed month. Hostwinds does not print a monthly equivalent on the hourly table. The point of the hourly line is a weekend test that costs cents, because a monthly refund, as the next section shows, is easy to miss. Products billed hourly are not eligible for a refund.

4. The 1 Gbps port, the monthly allowance, and the 3 Mbps cap

Every plan in the tables above is listed with a 1 Gbps port and a monthly transfer figure. The terms then say what happens when that figure is passed. Bandwidth "resets monthly on the services recurring billing day." The customer is "sole[ly] responsible" for watching usage in the Cloud Portal. Past the allowance, two things apply at once: an incremental fee of "$0.01 per Gigabit (Gb) of additional bandwidth used during a given month," and "a rate-limit of three Mbps (3 Megabits per second)." The unit in that fee clause is Gigabit, as printed. This page does not rewrite it as gigabyte and does not produce a dollar total from it. Upgrading to a tier with a larger allowance is the published way to lift the cap.

A 1 Gbps port that becomes a 3 Mbps port is the operational limit. The fee is the other one. Neither is a fair-use paragraph that a reader has to guess at; both are in the terms. Hostwinds' datacenter page also offers per-city download tests at 100 Mb, 1 Gb and 10 Gb, which is a latency and throughput probe against Hostwinds' own facilities, not a promise about a given VPS.

5. Dallas, Seattle and Amsterdam

The company datacenter page lists three facilities and calls them "SAS Type II, audited, Tier 3+ Data centers." The names on the map are Seattle, Dallas and Amsterdam. That is the published list. The VPS pages say "Multiple Locations" and do not, on the pages read for this one, assign a default city to a US visitor or rank the three by hardware generation. The US datacenter guide is the place on this site that maps US cities to latency, without a Hostwinds performance table.

6. Cancel, the 72-hour refund, auto-renew

Cancellation has to go through the Client Area on the service's management page. Other channels "would not be considered a valid cancellation request." A valid request takes "immediate effect, resulting in the termination of the service and the deletion of any content that may have been stored on the service." Backups are the customer's problem before that click. To stop a renewal, the cancellation has to land before the next billing cycle; otherwise the service renews and the payment falls under the refund rules.

Those rules are short. The service must already be cancelled. The refund request must then be made "within seventy-two (72) hours of the payment transaction time." Hostwinds "will not grant refunds in advance." The ineligible list is: software licenses, domains, SSL certificates, IP addresses, hourly services, services terminated for terms violations, and purchases made with cryptocurrency, tokens or digital assets. Refunds go to card, PayPal or Alipay; other methods get account credit. Account credits "will not be refunded back to the Client."

Billing is anniversary billing: the day the account opened is the recurring due date. New services are prorated onto that date. Non-hourly invoices outstanding more than fourteen days may be terminated. Prices can change with thirty days' notice. Hostwinds LLC is listed as a HostPapa Inc company, founded in 2010, on the unmanaged Linux page's structured data.

7. What Hostwinds does not publish

• A Linux processor model. The Linux plan pages do not name a SKU. The Intel sentence sits on the Windows VPS page only.
• NVMe, SATA, SAS, or a plan-disk IOPS integer. The feature list reads "Solid State Drives." The volumes copy says "low IOPs storage" for attached disks, which is qualitative, not a plan figure.
• A hypervisor name on the plan pages, cloud overview or support docs read for this page.
• A performance ranking of Dallas against Seattle, or a hardware-generation note per city, on those pages.
• A whole-server SLA. The 99.9999% figure in the SLA is network and power, with the exclusions listed above.

8. Measuring the parts that are not published

CPU model, disk IOPS and achievable throughput are measurable on the server. A buyer who wants those figures can run lscpu, sysbench cpu --threads=1 --time=60 run, a 4K fio test, and iperf3 against a machine near the users. This site publishes none of those measurements. The benchmarks hub has the commands, the storage page compares what other providers publish about disks, and an hourly cloud server is the cheap way to run the suite and destroy the box. Hostwinds' own datacenter page has per-city download buttons for a first pass at latency.

The comparison that belongs on a different page is price and support against InterServer's $3 slices. That write-up is the InterServer vs Hostwinds page. The Hostwinds review is a separate URL; this page does not take performance or support-test claims from it. For where $4.99 sits against other 1 GB and 2 GB US plans, see cheapest VPS.