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Quickstart

From sign-up to a shell on your own machine: create an account, add an SSH key, reserve and connect.

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This guide takes you from a new account to an SSH session on your reserved machine. It takes about ten minutes, most of it creating your SSH key if you don't have one yet.

1. Create your account

Go to the catalog, choose a machine and press Reserve. You'll be asked to create an account: your name, email address and a password.

We send you a verification email. Open the link in it — on any device — and you're signed in and taken back to the machine you chose. If the email doesn't arrive within a few minutes, check your spam folder, then use Resend verification email.

Sign-up is open in the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

2. Add an SSH key

The machine is set up with your SSH public key, so you log in without a password. If you already use SSH, you probably have a key: it's the one-line contents of a file such as ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub.

To create one, run this in a terminal (macOS, Linux, or PowerShell on Windows):

bash
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "you@example.com"

Press Enter to accept the default file, choose a passphrase, then print the public key and copy the whole line:

bash
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

On the reservation page, choose Add an SSH key (or + New SSH key), paste the line and give the key a name. You come straight back to your reservation with everything you had filled in. Generating a key has more detail, including Windows.

3. Reserve your days

On the reservation page:

  1. Instance name. Your machine's name for this reservation. It becomes part of its SSH address, so it uses lowercase letters, digits and hyphens. Stuck? Click the suggested name.
  2. SSH key. Pick the key you just added.
  3. Startup script (optional). A script that runs once when the machine is ready — for example, to download a model. You can start from one of the recommended templates. See Startup scripts.
  4. Your days. Tap your first day, then your last day. For a single day, tap it twice. Green days are free. See Using the calendar.

The summary shows the dates, the number of days and the total. Press Reserve and you're taken to Stripe to pay by card. Your days are held for you for about 30 minutes while you pay.

After paying, you land on My Reservations, where the reservation shows as Upcoming. A confirmation email with your receipt follows.

4. Connect

When your reservation starts (00:00 UTC on its first day), it shows as Setting up, then Live — within about five minutes. We email you when it's live, and your dashboard shows the SSH command with a copy button. It looks like this:

bash
ssh user@my-llm-box.res-4ad0a522.ssh.gputolease.ai

Always copy the command from your dashboard: the user name and address are specific to your reservation. If SSH asks for a password or says Permission denied (publickey), see Troubleshooting.

5. Before the end

An hour before your reservation ends we send an Ending soon email. Copy anything you want to keep off the machine before 23:59 UTC on your last day — see Copying files. When the reservation ends, the machine is wiped.