Netcup G12.5 Server Vouchers & YABS Benchmarks

Under German contract law, Netcup subscriptions renew automatically unless formally cancelled at least 31 calendar days before the current term expires. Cancellations must be submitted through the Customer Control Panel (CCP at ccp.netcup.net) under "Products" → select server → "Cancellation" → "At end of term". Deleting or powering off your server inside the Server Control Panel (SCP) does NOT terminate the underlying legal contract. Pro tip: If you order a test server or a 12-month promotional plan, submit cancellation "At end of term" right after delivery — your server stays 100% active until the final paid day without renewal surprises.

Netcup operates strictly within the German legal framework. If an invoice remains unpaid, a 1st warning (Mahnung) is issued after 7–10 days with reminder fees. If still unpaid, your instance is suspended (suspension fee approx. €20–€25). After 30–45 days, the debt is handed over to a collection agency (Creditreform or KSP Rechtsanwälte), significantly multiplying fees and impacting credit ratings (such as SCHUFA for EU residents). Never simply cancel your payment card; if you encounter difficulties, open a support ticket before the due date.

To prevent spam networks and credit card fraud, new customer orders (especially from outside Germany or paid via credit card) undergo manual review. The fraud-prevention department operates during German business hours (Mon–Fri 08:00–18:00 CET). Orders placed over the weekend are usually verified on Monday morning. To avoid delays: disable any VPN or proxy during signup (your IP must match your billing address country) and consider using prepayment or a verified PayPal account.

To protect IP subnet reputation, Netcup blocks port 25 by default on all newly provisioned instances via a firewall rule named "netcup Mail block". Unlike hosts that require manual support tickets, Netcup allows you to remove this restriction in 60 seconds: log into Server Control Panel (SCP at servercontrolpanel.de) → select your instance → "Firewall" → delete the "netcup Mail block" rule. Remember to set up a matching reverse DNS (rDNS/PTR) under the "Network" tab.

On Netcup VPS, compute cores are shared across neighbours via KVM time-sharing. During peak neighbor load, CPU Steal (%st in top) can fluctuate between 1% and 5%. On Root Servers (RS 500 to RS 8000 G12.5), you receive 100% dedicated hardware threads on enterprise AMD EPYC 9645 (Zen 5 Turin). CPU Steal is strictly 0.0%. Root Servers also support nested virtualization (running Proxmox or Docker inside LXC) and deliver over 187,000 FIO 4K NVMe IOPS.

All Netcup VPS and Root Servers come with unmetered traffic under a fair-use policy. There are ZERO per-gigabyte overage bills. If a server continuously saturates multi-gigabit connections (e.g. over 2–3 TB in 24 hours or exceeding 80–120 TB in a billing month), Netcup may temporarily shape port speed to 200–300 Mbit/s to protect rack switches. Full 2.5 Gbit/s throughput is automatically restored as soon as average traffic normalizes.

Cloud vLAN provides a free, private Layer 2 network between your instances via an auxiliary virtual interface with standard MTU 1500. Note: a vLAN works exclusively within the SAME datacenter facility (e.g., Nuremberg to Nuremberg). Cross-datacenter Layer 2 bridging (e.g., Nuremberg to Vienna) is not supported; for multi-region clustering, use encrypted overlay networks like WireGuard, Tailscale, or Cilium.

Snapshots created in the SCP use Copy-on-Write storage layers and are automatically purged by the system after exactly 30 calendar days. Snapshots are intended for quick rollbacks before risky OS upgrades, NOT as permanent backup archives. For long-term resilience, use automated deduplicating backup tools like BorgBackup or Restic targeting external storage (such as Storage Boxes or S3).

Netcup separates financial governance from systems administration. The Customer Control Panel (CCP) manages invoices, billing details, domains, DNS zones, and contract cancellations. The Server Control Panel (SCP) controls the KVM hypervisor (power actions, HTML5 VNC console, ISO mounting, snapshots, and hardware firewall). This allows you to grant sysadmins full SCP access without exposing commercial or billing operations.

No one-click in-place hypervisor upgrade is offered because Generation 12.5 runs on brand-new physical hardware nodes (AMD EPYC 9645 Turin with DDR5 ECC) and separate NVMe storage pools. The recommended zero-downtime workflow: order the new G12.5 server with an active voucher (e.g. 6874nc... for 2 free months on RS 1000), synchronize data and Docker containers via rsync/Ansible, update DNS records, and then submit cancellation for the older server in CCP effective at the end of its term.