What can be refunded, what cannot, and the honest reasons behind both.
Last updated: September 2026
This Refund Policy explains when Cenmax issues refunds, when it does not, and why. It is a standalone legal document, and it is incorporated by reference into the Cenmax Terms of Service (https://cenmax.in/terms-of-service). Where the two documents describe refunds differently, this document governs.
This policy applies to every product and service purchased from Cenmax through https://cenmax.in or the client portal at https://secure.cenmax.in, by any customer, in any market. All Cenmax services are billed in US Dollars, and all refunds are calculated and issued in US Dollars.
By placing an order you confirm that you have read this policy and that you understand which parts of your order can be refunded and which cannot. If you are unsure before you buy, ask us first — see What We Offer Instead.
Nothing in this policy removes any right you have under mandatory consumer law in your country of residence that cannot lawfully be waived by agreement.
This table is a summary for convenience. The detailed sections below are the operative terms.
| Product | Refundable? | Window |
|---|---|---|
| Shared web hosting (all locations) | Yes — money-back guarantee | 30 days from first purchase |
| Cloud hosting | Yes — money-back guarantee | 30 days from first purchase |
| Agency hosting | Yes — money-back guarantee | 30 days from first purchase |
| eCommerce hosting | Yes — money-back guarantee | 30 days from first purchase |
| VPS (unmanaged and managed) | No | — |
| Dedicated servers & managed dedicated | No | — |
| Colocation | No | — |
| Domain registrations, renewals & transfers | No | — |
| SSL certificates | No | — |
| Software licenses (e.g. Windows Server) | No | — |
| Setup, migration and professional service fees | No | — |
| Add-ons (extra IPs, DDoS-protected IPs, backups, management) | No | — |
| Account credit / balance top-ups | No — usable for Cenmax services only | — |
Our managed platform plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee for new customers. If the service is not right for you, tell us within 30 days of your first payment and we will refund that payment, subject to the conditions below.
The guarantee applies to, and only to:
These run on our own managed platform behind MaxPanel. No other product is covered — in particular, managed VPS and managed dedicated servers are not, for the reasons set out in section 5.
Some parts of an order are paid out to third parties the moment you place it, and cannot be recovered. These are deducted from the refund:
Transaction fees charged by the payment processor are not returned to us on a refund and are not part of the refunded amount.
The following are non-refundable, in whole or in part, once ordered:
Services are prepaid for the billing cycle you selected. If you cancel mid-term, service continues until the end of the paid period and no refund or credit is issued for unused time. Cancelling simply stops the next renewal — you can do this yourself in the client portal, and we ask for at least 5 days' notice before the renewal date so the automatic payment does not run.
Upgrade charges are non-refundable. Downgrading mid-term does not generate a refund or credit for the difference; the new, lower price applies from the next billing cycle onward.
None of the above affects genuine billing errors. If you were charged twice for the same service, charged after a documented cancellation, or charged for something you never ordered, that is not a refund request — it is a mistake, and we will correct it in full regardless of product.
This covers every VPS and every dedicated server, managed or unmanaged. We would rather explain it than hide it in a clause. There are two reasons, and the second is the important one.
A VPS reserves CPU cores, RAM and disk on a node that nobody else can then be sold. A dedicated server is a physical machine that is racked, cabled, provisioned and handed over — a process that takes 12 to 24 hours of real work and takes that machine out of inventory. IPv4 addresses are allocated to you and, once used, carry your history with them. Unlike a shared hosting account, none of this can be reset to "as new" and resold the next day at no cost.
VPS and dedicated servers come with full root access, dedicated IPv4 addresses, reverse DNS control and — on our unmanaged VPS in Dallas — an open port 25 for outbound mail. Choosing a managed plan does not change this: management means our team looks after the operating system, patching, monitoring and backups for you, not that we restrict what you are allowed to run on your own server. You still hold root, and the server still has its own IP reputation to lose. That combination is exactly what legitimate customers need, and it is also exactly what abusers want. A refundable term on these products creates a straightforward business model for them: buy a server, burn it for 25 days, ask for the money back, repeat next month with a new account. In practice that has meant:
The cost of this is not the server. Servers come back. What does not come back quickly is IP reputation. When an address is used for spam or attack traffic, it lands on blocklists such as Spamhaus SBL and CSS, UCEPROTECT and various private RBLs — and those listings frequently escalate from the single address to the surrounding /24 and to the announcing network. Delisting takes weeks of evidence and correspondence, and while it is pending, every other customer on that range suffers: their mail is silently dropped, their sites are flagged, their transactional email stops arriving. One refunded server can degrade deliverability for hundreds of people who did nothing wrong.
Making these products non-refundable is the simplest control that removes the incentive without punishing legitimate customers. It means the person buying a VPS to abuse it has to pay for it, which is enough to make most of that activity uneconomic, and it lets us keep the features honest users actually came for — root access, clean IPs, rDNS delegation and open outbound mail — instead of stripping them out to manage risk.
Shared, cloud, agency and eCommerce hosting can carry a 30-day guarantee precisely because they carry none of that risk. They run on our own platform behind MaxPanel: there is no root access, no dedicated IP and no rDNS delegation. Outbound mail is rate-limited at the server, bulk mailing and mailing lists are prohibited, and no account may consume more than 25% of a node's resources for more than 10 consecutive minutes. The blast radius of a bad actor is small, visible and reversible, and the account can be reset to as-new and resold the same day.
That is the whole line, and it is drawn on capability rather than on price: if the product hands you the keys to the operating system and an IP address of your own, it is non-refundable. If we hold those keys and run the platform, it is covered by the guarantee.
These are not Cenmax margin. They are pass-through purchases where a third party charges us, permanently, at the moment of ordering:
If a domain registration or certificate issuance fails — the registration never completes, or the CA declines to issue — nothing was purchased on your behalf and you are refunded in full.
A non-refundable product is not the same as a "buy it and hope". Before you commit to a VPS or a dedicated server, use these instead of a refund window:
And the standing promise that makes long terms safe: the renewal price is the purchase price. You are never signing up to a cheap first term that jumps later.
Services terminated for a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy are not refunded, and no unused time is credited. This applies to shared hosting inside the 30-day window as well as to every other product.
This includes spam and unsolicited bulk email, phishing and fraud, malware distribution, CSAM, IP spoofing and network abuse, DDoS activity, and the other prohibited uses listed in the Terms of Service. Where a violation is intentional, we terminate immediately and may report the account to fraud databases and to the relevant authorities.
Where the breach was unintentional, our normal practice is two written warnings before termination — the point of the policy is to stop abuse, not to catch people out.
Failures against our uptime guarantee are compensated with service credits, not cash refunds. Credits are worth 1% of your recurring monthly cost per hour of downtime, capped at 10% of the monthly cost, must be requested within 7 days of the event, and are applied to future invoices only.
Scheduled maintenance, issues caused by your own configuration or software, and force majeure events are excluded. Full detail is in the Service Level Agreement: https://cenmax.in/sla
Open a billing ticket from the client portal at https://secure.cenmax.in. Include:
Requests must come from the registered account holder, through the account, so that we can verify them. We do not action refund requests sent from unverified email addresses or third parties.
For a 30-day guarantee claim, the ticket must be opened within the 30-day window. We aim to give a decision within 3 business days, and we will tell you plainly if a request falls outside this policy and why.
Approved refunds are returned to the original payment method — the card, PayPal account, UPI ID or bank account the payment came from. We cannot redirect a refund to a different person, account or instrument.
We process approved refunds within 7 business days. How long the money then takes to appear is up to your bank or payment provider, and is commonly a further 5 to 10 business days for cards and bank transfers.
All amounts are calculated in US Dollars. If your bank converted the original payment into another currency, the amount you receive back may differ from the amount you paid because exchange rates move and conversion spreads apply — that difference sits with your bank, not with us. Payment processor fees on the original transaction are not refundable.
Where a refund cannot be returned to the original method, we may issue the amount as account credit instead. Account credit has no cash value and can only be used for Cenmax services.
If you believe a charge is wrong, raise a ticket first. We would far rather fix it directly than argue it through a payment processor.
Filing a chargeback or a payment dispute without contacting us first will result in immediate suspension of all services on the account while the dispute is open, and we will respond to the processor with our service and access records. Accounts with a fraudulent chargeback may be terminated and reported to fraud databases, and any dispute fees charged to us become payable before service is restored.
Cenmax may modify this Refund Policy at any time. Changes are posted on this page with an updated "Last updated" date, and the version in force at the time of your purchase is the one that applies to that purchase.
For material changes that affect your rights, we will give notice by email at least 30 days before they take effect.
If anything here is unclear — especially before you buy something non-refundable — ask us. We would rather talk you out of the wrong plan than refund the right one.
Related documents:
Terms of Service — https://cenmax.in/terms-of-service
Service Level Agreement — https://cenmax.in/sla
Privacy Policy — https://cenmax.in/privacy-policy