Free trial server: how RE:NODE trials work, no card needed

A RE:NODE free trial is a real server on a real plan, built by the same machinery that builds a paid one, with no card asked for. You press "Try free" under a plan, sign in or register, confirm your email, and start it. Game and database lines usually run for 24 hours; app, web and one-click lines usually run for 30 days, but pause every 24 hours until you press Renew. Each account gets one trial, ever. When you pay, the trial becomes the paid plan - same server, same files, same address - and nothing has to be rebuilt or uploaded again. When you do not pay, the server is suspended, kept with its files for 7 days, and then deleted.

That is the whole mechanism. The rest of this post is the detail: which plans offer a trial, what the two modes actually do hour by hour, the limits a trial runs under, and - the part most people skip - how to spend a short trial so that at the end you know whether to pay. That last section applies to a trial on any host.

What you get, and what it costs you#

A trial is not a demo account or a shared sandbox. The panel creates an ordinary server on the plan you clicked, with the same console, file manager, SFTP and settings a paying customer has. Every plan gets the same panel and nothing is gated by tier, so the thing you are judging is the thing you would be buying.

What it costs you is an account with a verified email address and nothing else. There is no card on file, so there is nothing to forget to cancel. A trial that runs out does not turn into a charge - it turns into a suspended server, and then into no server.

What it does not give you:

• More than one. One trial per account, for ever. Choose the plan you are actually considering.
• The big tier. Trials are offered on the smallest tier of each line only. A game that needs the third tier to run well will not be shown at its best on the first one - more on that below.
• A renode.space address. Trial servers cannot take a renode.space subdomain. You can connect to the server's own address, or point a domain you already own at it.
• Every product. VDS and S3 object storage have no trial, because they are not servers the panel builds for you on the spot.

Which plans have a trial#

The site draws a "Try free" button under a plan's buy button only when the panel says that plan offers one, and the button states the length: "Try free for 24 hours" or "Try free for 30 days". Under it is one line, "No card needed." If a plan has no button, it has no trial. On the home page, the "Start free" button opens a picker, "Pick a server to try", that lists every plan with a trial grouped by category.

The rules behind the button:

The usual split is by category. App hosting, web hosting and the one-click lines (WordPress, Ghost, Strapi) default to the 30-day mode, because a website or an API is something you judge over a couple of weeks of edits and deploys. Game servers and databases default to the 24-hour mode, because whether a game runs well for your group is something you find out in an evening. The mode can be set differently for a particular plan, so read the button rather than assuming.

There is also a cap on how many trial servers can exist at once. If it is full, starting one fails with "There is no room for a new trial right now. Please try again later." That is a capacity answer, not a judgement about your account - try again later the same day.

Starting a trial: the /try link and what happens next#

Every "Try free" button is a plain link to the panel at an address of the form https://panel.renode.space/try/<plan>, where <plan> is the plan's number. Opening that link creates nothing. Link previews in chat apps and browser prefetchers open links nobody clicked, and a server should not appear because a URL was pasted into Discord. The link only decides where you go next.

What happens depends on whether you are signed in:

1. Signed out: the panel remembers which plan you clicked and sends you to the login page. Sign in, or register from there. After signing in - including with a social sign-in, or after registering in the same browser - you land back on the same plan.
2. Signed in: you go straight to the trial page for that plan.
3. If your email is not verified yet, the page tells you so and offers "Resend verification email". A trial needs a verified address.
4. The dialog, "Start your free trial", shows the plan, the length, the hold period, "One free trial per account." and "Trial servers cannot use a renode.space address." Press Start free trial.
5. The panel builds the server. The clock starts when the trial starts, not when you first log in to the server.

That last point matters for a handful of games. CS2 and Unturned need a Steam game-server token, FiveM a Cfx.re key, Don't Starve Together a Klei token, BeamMP an auth key, and Arma 3, DayZ, Project Zomboid and 7 Days to Die a Steam login. On those, the server is built at once but the install waits on the Setup tab until you supply the credential. On a 24-hour trial, have the token ready before you press start - our posts on Steam game-server tokens and the BeamMP auth key cover getting one.

If the start is refused, the message says why in one sentence. The ones you can act on:

Verify your email address to start a free trial.You have already used your free trial.This plan has no free trial.There is no room for a new trial right now. Please try again later.

The 24-hour mode#

The 24-hour mode is the simple one. The server runs for 24 hours from the moment the trial starts. Two hours before the end you get an email. At the end the server is suspended and enters a 7-day hold: it is stopped, nothing runs, but every file is still on the disk. The bar on the server page changes to "Trial ended. Your files are kept until" a date, with a count of the days left. Twenty-four hours before deletion you get a second email, the one with the buy button. At the end of the hold the server is deleted, and with it its backups.

The useful thing about the hold is that you do not have to decide inside the 24 hours. If you spent the evening setting up a world, got everyone connected, and then went to bed, you have a week to come back and pay, and the world is where you left it.

The 30-day mode and the daily Renew#

The 30-day mode is where people get confused, so here it is exactly. The trial lasts 30 days in total, but the server does not run for all of them by itself. Every 24 hours it pauses: it is suspended and stops answering. You press Renew on the server page and it runs for another 24 hours. The pauses happen inside the 30 days and never extend them.

The reason is honest enough to state plainly. A month of a server running unattended is a free month with no reason to come back. A trial you renew each day is a trial you are actually using, and it is the point where the panel can tell you how long is left.

The details that decide whether you get caught out:

• When Renew works. Once the server has paused, or in the last 2 hours before the next pause. Pressing it at nine in the morning for a pause due at eleven at night does nothing useful, so the button waits. The bar above the server shows "Pauses in", then "Renew opens in", and then the button itself, "Renew 24 h".
• No reminder per pause. There is no email for each daily pause - thirty mails in a month is how mail gets filtered as spam. The one email is 2 hours before the 30 days run out.
• The last day is not longer. The next pause is either 24 hours away or the end of the trial, whichever is sooner.
• Abandoning it. A 30-day trial left paused for 7 days without a renew goes to the hold early, exactly as if it had ended.
• After the 30 days. The same 7-day hold as the 24-hour mode, the same deletion email 24 hours before the end, then deletion.

While a 30-day trial is paused, the server is stopped. A website on it is down and a bot on it is offline until you renew. That makes the 30-day mode a fair test of how a site or an API behaves, but not a place to run something people depend on overnight. Renewal is the owner's job: a subuser on the server sees "Only the owner can buy or renew this trial."

Keeping the server when you pay#

When you pay, the trial is converted, not replaced. It is the same server - the same files, the same database contents, the same address and port. The point of converting rather than building fresh is that someone who has spent a week on a site should not lose it on the day they buy it.

You pay through the normal renewal paths: the Buy now button on the trial bar or on the trial's card on the billing page, using wallet balance, PayPal, or a bank-transfer invoice. The ordinary renewal arithmetic then gives the server a fresh paid term starting from the moment you pay, with the invoice a renewal produces. If the server was suspended, paying brings it back on the plan's normal settings. A bank transfer takes longer than a click, so the panel does not delete a held trial while an invoice for it is still pending.

A trial only converts to the plan it is on, and that plan is the smallest tier. If the trial showed you the server needs more memory, pay for it and then change plan: changing plan does not rebuild the server, so the files stay where they are. Our post on when to upgrade your plan covers how to read the numbers before you do.

The limits a trial runs under#

A trial runs at its plan's size and has the same panel, but a free server attracts a particular kind of user, so there are three rules a paid server does not have.

No renode.space subdomain

Trial servers are refused a name under renode.space. The name is the company's to hand out, and a free trial is the one place it is not. For a game server you connect by address and port, which is what most players do anyway. For a site on an app or web trial, point an A record for a domain you own at the address the panel shows - see your domain and its certificate - or test on the bare address until you pay.

The CPU guard

A trial server that sits at 90% or more of its own CPU limit for ten minutes in a row is killed and flagged to our staff. The threshold is against the plan's own share, not the machine, and ten minutes is deliberate: a game generating a world or a build compiling spikes for a minute or two, a miner runs flat out for ever. Killed means the process is stopped, not that the trial is suspended. You can start it again, and a person reads the flag and decides whether anything else should happen.

If a legitimate workload trips it - a big build on a small app tier, say - that is information too: the smallest plan cannot carry it, and on a paid plan it would be slow, not stopped. A server at 100% of its CPU is slow, never grounds for suspension on a paid plan.

Pauses are not crashes

The panel watches every server for crashes and acts on repeated restarts. A trial pause is the panel stopping the server on purpose, and it is excused exactly as a restart you asked for is, so thirty daily pauses do not count as thirty crashes.

What to test during a trial#

A trial is only useful if at the end you can answer "would this host do the job". On any host, these are the things worth checking, roughly in order of how often they decide the question.

On a game server (24 hours)

1. Does it start clean. Read the console from the first line. A server that starts with warnings about its own configuration on a host's default install tells you something. Our guide to reading the console covers what matters.
2. Can everyone connect. Get the whole group on, not just you. Most connection trouble is ports and versions - why players cannot connect walks through it.
3. What the latency looks like from where your players are. On RE:NODE the Console tab has an Average Ping figure measured from 12 countries when you press "Test now", and a Hops count traced from our side. Your players' own numbers matter more; ask each of them.
4. What memory does under load. Watch the memory graph while everyone is on and the world is busy. If it rides near the plan's limit on the smallest tier, you already know which tier you would buy.
5. Can you get your files in and out. Upload a mod or a world over SFTP, download a backup. If a host makes your own files hard to reach on day one, it will not be easier on day ninety.

For the memory question, a rough guide by game is in how many players fit on a server. The trial will not always be the right size for a full group, and that is the point of watching the graph.

On an app or website (30 days)

You have time, so test the things that only show up over days:

• Deploys. Link a GitHub repository and push a change. The app lines pull on start and can deploy on push; see deploying a Node app from GitHub and the deploys guide.
• Your real stack. Connect the database you would actually use, not a toy.
• Restarts. Every daily pause is a stop and a start. If your app does not come back cleanly after a restart, you will find out on day two instead of in production.
• Backups. Take one and restore it. A backup nobody has restored is a hypothesis - backups that actually restore is the long version.

A quick way to check the SFTP side from your own machine, with the host, port and username copied from the server's SFTP details in the panel:

$ sftp -P <port> <username>@<host>sftp> lssftp> get -r config ./config-backup

If that works on day one, moving off the host later is a download, not a negotiation.

On a database (24 hours)

Connect from where the application will run, with the generated credentials, and run a real query against real-sized data. Check that your client and driver are happy with the engine version. Twenty-four hours is enough to find out whether the connection string works and whether import is painless; it is not enough to judge performance under months of growth, so be realistic about what the day can tell you.

Common problems and their answers#

Most trouble with trials falls into a few cases.

• "You have already used your free trial" on a new account. The rule is one per account and per email, and the email is normalised: a +tag is ignored on every provider, and for Gmail the dots in the name are ignored too. A deleted account still counts. This is deliberate.
• "This plan has no free trial." You followed a link to a plan other than the smallest tier, or one with trials off. Go back to the plan list and use the button that is there.
• The trial page keeps asking for verification. Check spam for the verification mail, then use "Resend verification email". The trial cannot start until the address is confirmed.
• The server stopped and the bar says "Paused". That is the 30-day mode's daily pause. Press Renew.
• The server stopped and nothing says why. If you were running something that held the CPU at its limit for ten minutes, the CPU guard killed it. Start it again; if it happens again, the workload does not fit the smallest tier.
• A teammate cannot renew or buy. Only the server owner can.
• You paid but the server is still suspended. A bank transfer converts the trial when it clears, not when you send it. Balance and PayPal payments convert it straight away. If it is still stuck, open the Chat panel from the server header - it works on a suspended server.

FAQ#

Do I need a credit card to start a free trial?

No. A trial needs an account with a verified email address and nothing else. Nothing is charged when it ends; the server is suspended, held for 7 days, and then deleted unless you pay.

Can I have a free trial on more than one game or plan?

No. It is one trial per account, ever, across every line. Pick the plan you are most likely to buy. If you want to compare two games, use the trial on the one with more unknowns and read the plan specs for the other.

Why is my 30-day trial stopping every day?

Because the 30-day mode pauses every 24 hours by design and waits for you to press Renew. The 30 days are counted from the start whether or not the server was running, so a pause costs you running time, not trial length.

Will I lose my world or my site when I upgrade from the trial?

No. Paying converts the trial server in place, so the world, the files and the address are the ones you already have. If you then change to a bigger plan, that does not rebuild the server either.

What happens if I forget to pay before the trial ends?

The server is suspended with its files intact for 7 days, and you get an email 24 hours before it is deleted. Paying at any point in that week brings it back as a paid server. After the week, it and its backups are gone.

Can I use my own domain on a trial?

Yes, a domain you own can be pointed at a trial server. What a trial cannot have is a renode.space subdomain.