There are a few options for deleting your VPS. You can delete the VM itself, or you can securely wipe the content before the VM is deleted. These methods ensure that your content is not recoverable even after deleting the VM/VPS.

If you want to delete your VPS, you will need to contact our billing team to cancel the service. Once you cancel the service, you will have a period of 24 hours to recover it for any reason. After this set time, it will be fully deleted from our system.

If you want to securely delete your content before deleting the VM, follow the steps below.

How To Securely Delete Your Content 

We will provide two different methods of erasing your data.  

1. Write Zeros (Quickest) 

2. Write Random Characters (Longest) 

For reference, we ran a test on an SSD VPS1GB which includes 25GBs of storage.  

• Writing zeros wiped 25GBs of data in 5 minutes. 

• Writing random characters wiped 25GBs of data in 1.5 hours.  

Keep in mind that this was on an SSD VPS. If you want to complete this same task on a Cloud VPS, it will take longer due to the differences in storage devices.  

To accomplish the deletion, you will need to boot the VPS into recovery mode. This will be a CentOS environment. To do so, please follow the steps below: 

1. Log into chi.westhost.com. 

2. Navigate to "SSD VPS" in the left column. 

3. Select the VPS you wish to work with.  

4. From the overview page, select "Reboot in Recovery" 

Click "Okay" on the prompt after selecting "Reboot in Recovery". 

Once the server finishes rebooting, you will have complete internet/SSH access to the server. You will find your login details in the pink box at the top of the overview page. If you do not wish to use SSH, you can access the server through Console as well.  

Note that this step is optional. If you would like to see a progress bar or something to reference how much of the disk has been erased, you can install PV (Pipe Viewer). To install PV, run the command below. 

After PV is installed, you will need to find the name of your disks. To find the name of your disks, run the command below: 

 This will output a list of drives and partitions. The drive you are looking for will look like this: 

Write Zeros:  

This first method will show you how to write zeros to all of your content. This is a secure method, but not the most secure. If you want to make sure your content is gone, you will want to use the random write method below.  

If you chose not to install PV, please run the command below: 

Replace %hd% with the name of the partition or drive. In the example above it would be via.   

This first method will not show progress if you aren't using PV. You will have to wait for the command to finish running, which can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. The time spent running the command is based on the size of your drive.  

If you installed PV, use the command below:  

Replace %hd% with the name of your drive.  

Write Random Characters:  

This deletion method is the same as the process above. The only difference is we will change /dev/zero to /dev/random. 

If you chose not to install PV, please use the command below: 

If you installed PV, use this command: 

After running the command with PV, you will see an output of how much data has been written over with zeros or random data and how much time has elapsed. Once complete, you can now contact our billing team to cancel your VPS.