A customer shutdown, a billing suspension and deleting a server have different consequences. Use the PD DigitalOcean Droplets service state and Activity to understand which action occurred before trying to bring a server back.

Use customer power controls

When your hosting team enables Client: Power controls, your customer’s service offers Power on, Shut down and Reboot as appropriate. Shut down requests an orderly shutdown; the server remains off until it is powered on again.

Check the intended service and arrange any maintenance before rebooting or shutting it down. Afterwards, confirm the state and application health. A running instance does not establish that every application started correctly.

Understand suspension

The module powers a suspended service off. This is a hard power-off, so running applications can lose unsaved work even though disk data is retained. A suspended customer cannot use normal power controls to undo the billing suspension. Unsuspending starts the server again through the supported platform process.

A powered-off Droplet still incurs provider charges. Suspension therefore keeps the server for later recovery; it is not a way to stop all provider costs.

Understand termination

WHMCS’s module termination deletes the server. A customer’s cancellation request and a completed provider teardown are different stages; review the actual module result.

The module’s cleanup handles the storage, firewall, dedicated IP and registered SSH keys it created for that service. Deleting the main server directly in the provider panel is not equivalent to completing that module cleanup.

Customer-created manual snapshots are intentionally retained on the operator’s DigitalOcean account and can continue to incur storage charges. Review required retention separately; do not delete a recovery point merely because a server was cancelled.

Read usage and activity during diagnosis

Use Usage Graphs for the available CPU and inbound/outbound bandwidth history, and Activity for the server operations. Graphs describe resource use, not an application diagnosis or permission to restart a customer’s server. An empty graph can need a separate state/metrics check.

If an active billing record points to a server removed outside the module, compare the service reference, latest Activity and provider state using your own DigitalOcean access. Do not recreate the service blindly or mark a deleted server Running to hide the mismatch.

See the PD DigitalOcean Droplets WHMCS guide for related tasks, or explore the module.