How to sell web hosting VPS with InterServer

InterServer is the second external supplier Provibr integrates, and it is a very different animal from Hetzner. It is American, it is cheap, it sells capacity in slices rather than named machine types, and its API has a few sharp edges that are worth knowing before you build a product on it. Everything below about the API is something we measured against a real InterServer account, with a real order and a real payment.

We support InterServer live. As with any supplier, we will be exact about what "live" covers rather than imply more.

The slice model

InterServer does not sell you a "CX23" or a "medium". It sells slices, and everything else scales from the slice count.

InterServer's cloud VPS is priced at $3.00 per slice per month, where one slice provides 1 CPU core, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD storage and 2 TB of monthly transfer; a configuration can run from 1 slice ($3/month) up to 32 slices ($96/month), with RAM, storage and transfer scaling linearly with the slice count.

That linear model is genuinely nice to build a price ladder on: a 4-slice machine is $12 and gives you 4 cores, 8 GB and 160 GB, and you can predict every rung. There is a separate high-storage platform where a slice carries far more disk, which matters for a detail we cover below.

InterServer's cloud VPS is offered from three United States regions and lists no European location; operating system choices include AlmaLinux, Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, with Windows Server available at additional cost.

Three American regions, no European one. If your customers care about latency to Europe or about EU data residency, this is the wrong supplier and you should reach for Hetzner instead. Once a machine is running we charge the same to manage it whichever supplier it sits on, so the recurring relationship gives us no reason to steer you, but we should name the one place our interests are not neutral: we earn an affiliate commission when someone opens an InterServer account through the link on this page, and Hetzner does not pay us one. We are still pointing you at Hetzner for Europe.

The single API key, and what it opens

This is the first thing to understand before you connect InterServer, and it is a property of their API rather than a flaw.

InterServer issues one API key per account, and it is not scoped. There is no read-only variant, no per-resource permission, no separate key for VPS versus billing. The key that lets Provibr list and manage your virtual machines is the same key that can read your billing details, change the account password, and touch payment methods on the account. There is one published way to make a new key, and making one rotates the old one, which breaks anything else using it.

We are not describing a vulnerability: this is InterServer's documented design, one key per account. But it changes how you should treat the credential. When you connect InterServer to Provibr, you are handing over a key to the whole account, so it belongs to an account you are comfortable delegating in full. Provibr says this in the credential help before you paste the key, precisely because the "just an API key" instinct undersells what this particular key can do.

Ordering is a purchase, and it spends real money

On your own hardware, "create a VM" costs nothing but capacity. On InterServer, creating a VPS is a purchase with a price, drawn from your InterServer prepay balance. That single fact shapes the whole flow.

POST /vps/order places an order and produces an invoice; the machine does not run until that invoice is paid from your prepay balance. Provibr handles both, and it does two careful things around the money:

• It prices the order before placing it. InterServer exposes a dry-run (PUT /vps/order) that costs nothing and returns the price and a continue/errors verdict. Provibr runs that first, checks your prepay balance covers it, and refuses the whole creation before an order, a machine or an invoice exists if the balance is short. We measured the dry-run returning {"continue":true,"errors":[],"service_cost":3} for a one-slice order.
• It pays automatically, and retries. Once the order is placed the payment is drawn from prepay without waiting for a human, and a worker retries a failed payment because a machine that is ordered-but-unpaid is not running. If payment keeps failing past half an hour, you get one notification per server: visible, never silent.

Because ordering spends your balance, connecting InterServer requires you to accept a short disclaimer that names exactly this: that orders draw down your prepay, and that the key is account-wide. That consent is recorded with the version of the text you agreed to. It is the one place the flow deliberately stops for a yes.

Delivery is slow: design for an hour, not a minute

Here is the measurement that surprised us most, and it is the reason the design is what it is.

We timed one real delivery end to end. From payment, the machine sat in pending for 46 minutes, then in setup for a further six, and only then went active. The whole delivery took about 52 minutes. The IP address appeared about half a minute before active.

That is one machine, so it is an observation and not a guaranteed ceiling, but it means you should tell your customer "your server will be ready shortly, this can take up to an hour", not "instantly". It is also why Provibr models ordering and delivery as two separate things: ordering and paying both answer immediately, and the machine coming to life afterwards is something Provibr observes through status polling, rather than a command that hangs open for the better part of an hour.

There is a subtlety in those statuses worth its own article, because InterServer's pending does not mean what it looks like: a machine can be fully paid and still read pending for the better part of an hour. We cover it in InterServer's pending does not mean unpaid.

What "delete" actually does

On most providers, delete destroys the machine and stops the meter. On InterServer it does not.

DELETE /vps/{id} is a cancellation at end of term, not a deletion. The machine is marked canceled, it keeps running until the paid-through date, and there is no refund for the remainder. Provibr's confirmation dialog says this before you press it, and it records a cancellation date on the row, because "delete" behaving like "cancel my subscription" is exactly the kind of surprise that generates an angry ticket if the panel is silent about it.

What Provibr does, and what it does not

Live: connect and test, import existing machines, status, start, stop, restart, order (with the pricing and auto-pay above), and cancel. The power commands are worth one note: on InterServer they are issued as a GET, which means no automatic-retry layer, prefetcher or link preloader should ever be pointed at them, because a repeated GET repeats the action. Provibr treats them accordingly.

Not built, each for a measured reason:

• No console. InterServer's console is plain VNC, but the endpoint is IP-allowlisted to a single address the API cannot set, so we cannot open it for you honestly.
• No metrics graphs. InterServer reports usage at hourly granularity, which does not fit the fine-grained graphs the rest of the panel draws.
• No reinstall. Reinstalling an OS on InterServer requires the account login password, which we will not store.
• No suspend. InterServer keeps billing until cancellation, so there is no "suspend to stop the meter" to expose.

One data-quality detail we handle so you do not have to: InterServer's OS choice is an opaque template key, not a clean name. We measured a template labelled ubuntu24 that actually ships Debian. Provibr passes the key through and shows the label it is given, and does not pretend to reason about what the key "means", because the key, not the label, is what InterServer acts on.

Read next

• InterServer setup: the single API key, the prepay model, and what the connection test checks.
• InterServer's pending does not mean unpaid: the three status fields you actually need.
• Hetzner Cloud vs InterServer: the two suppliers side by side.

InterServer prices, locations and OS list were read from interserver.net on 26 August 2026. The single-key design, the 52-minute delivery, the dry-run price, the cancellation-at-term behaviour and the opaque OS key were all measured against a live InterServer account, with a real order and a real payment, while building the Provibr integration.