Step 1: Log In to your account

Log In to your account. If you don’t have an account, please sign up for a Free Trial. You are now in the control panel. Here you can set up, stop and start servers, and create and manage the drives that you install the servers on to.

Step 2: Add a server and a hard drive. Start your server

In the top menu bar, you’ll see an ‘Add’ button for adding servers and drives. Add a server called ‘test’, pre-installed with Debian Linux 6.0 and a 10 GB drive, and click on ‘Add’. Your server and its drive will appear in the control panel, but the drive will initially show “imaging” while the operating system is copied onto it. Wait a few seconds until the image processing has finished. On your server, click the Start icon. In your server, you will see an IP address and VNC password which you will require for the next step. You can set up pre-installed servers and drives for many common operating systems, here are the options available when you’re adding new instances >>

Step 3: Connect to your server

Connect via VNC: Launch our in-browser VNC viewer by clicking on ‘Show screen’. See our VNC tutorial for more details, including how to connect via a local VNC client. You can log in over VNC as “root” with a blank password, or with username “toor” and your VNC password. Connect via SSH: You can also connect to your Linux Cloud Server using SSH. SSH is built into Linux and MacOS. We recommend PuTTY as an SSH client for Windows. You can log in over SSH using the username “toor” with your VNC password, or using the username “root” once you have set a root password on the server.

Congratulations you now have a Linux Cloud Server!

Now your server is running, it is a fully-functional Debian Linux system. You can shut it down and the data will be stored on the drive. You can reboot (restart) it again and the data will still be there, along with the configuration and the data and the software that you’ve installed on it.

Options available when you’re adding new instances:

• You can add a server or a drive only. When you add a server, you get the drive and a server that’s set up to boot from that drive. When you add a drive, you just get the drive.
• You can supply a name for the server and/or drive.

Then we have a range of installation types:

• Pre-installed: take one of our standard images and make a copy of it onto a drive in your own account. We have Debian, Ubuntu, a variety of Linux and Windows images.
• Self-install from CD: here the server is running one of the install CDs we have provided centrally, and it’s also attached to a blank drive in your account. You install from the CD to the drive. We have a wide variety of Linux options as well as FreeBSD and a variety of Windows trial CDs that you can install as a trial or activate with your own licence keys.
• Boot from live CD: boot off a centrally provided CD image with no permanent data storage.
• Boot from existing drive: if you have a drive already and just want to create a server that uses it.