Most server hosts hide the refund and credit rules in 30 pages of T&C and hope you never read them. Ours fit on one page. Here is exactly how it works.
Credits, in one paragraph
Credits are pre-paid balance on your account. Every time you deploy, the credit price (lower than the pay-now price) is deducted. Credits never expire, buy when convenient, spend whenever. Larger top-ups carry bonus credits, up to 50% extra. Your free Small server doesn't touch your credit balance at all.
When a server doesn't boot
Sometimes a deploy fails, a cloud provider hiccup, a Steam download error, a CS2 patch breaking the boot script. If the server doesn't reach the ready state and you paid with credits, your credits are returned automatically. You don't need to ask, file a ticket, or wait, the refund hits within a minute of the failure. If you paid by card, the failure is flagged to us and we refund you by hand.
If the failure cost you real time (your group was waiting, the moment was ruined), email support@2hours.gg with the server ID and roughly when it happened. We usually cover these with bonus credits on top of the automatic refund.
The 30-minute grace period
Your paid time only starts when the first player connects. You get 30 minutes of grace for everyone to log in, counted from when the server is ready. If your group is late and only joins 20 minutes after that, you still get your full paid duration.
Unused grace time gets added back at the end too, if you only used 10 minutes of grace, the server stays up 20 minutes longer than the nominal end time. The math is in your favour by default.
When something breaks mid-match
Rare, but it happens, a crash, a network blip. First, try to reconnect. The server restarts the game by itself and you rejoin with the same connect string. If it keeps happening or doesn't come back at all, that's a refund or credit conversation. Email support with the server ID and what happened.
Our default is to make it right with credits, typically more generous than a straight refund, but if you'd prefer a refund to your original payment method, just say so.
Extending mid-session
While a server is running, you can extend it by 2, 4 or 6 hours from the dashboard. An extension costs the same as a new server of that size for that long. On CS2 you'll also see warnings in chat at 5 minutes and 1 minute before scheduled shutdown. On every game, your server card on the Console page shows when the server expires, so it doesn't catch you off-guard.
Why this matters
Server rentals fail. Cloud providers have outages, CS2 patches break things, sometimes packets just don't arrive. The thing that distinguishes a good host from a bad one is what happens after the failure. Our position: a failed server you paid for is our problem, not yours, and we'd rather over-refund than have you not come back.