10-minute quick start

This walks you from nothing to a working setup. You need one server and the details to log into it. If you do not have those details yet, read What to have ready first — it is a short list.

Minute 1 — Sign up

Create the account and enter the 6-digit code we email you. Detail: Create your account.

Minute 2 — Make a project

Click + next to the project name in the sidebar.

• Name it something you will recognise, for example My website.
• Choose Server Only unless you specifically want to connect Amazon Web Services today.
• Save.

Detail: Projects explained.

Minutes 3–5 — Add your server

You land on the Servers page. Click Add server and follow three steps:

1. Details — a name, the IP address, and the username (usually root).
2. Login — a password, or a key file if that is how you connect.
3. Check & save — we make one test connection. The server saves only if that connection works.

If the test fails, the screen tells you in plain words what to check and offers a button back to the step that probably holds the mistake. Every failure message is explained in When a server will not connect.

Detail: Add a server.

Minute 6 — Look at the health card

Your server now appears as a card with a status badge and six numbers: disk, memory, load, services, updates, restart needed. Anything wrong is written as a sentence — "1 service stopped: nginx", "3 security updates waiting".

Click any of those sentences and it opens the tool that deals with it.

Detail: Server health.

Minute 7 — Open the server

Click the server name. You get thirteen tabs. The useful ones on day one:

• Monitor — live CPU, memory, disk, and what is using them.
• Services — the list of things that are supposed to be running, with start / stop / restart buttons.
• Logs — the files where your server writes what went wrong.

Detail: The server workspace.

Minutes 8–9 — Ask the assistant something

Open Chatbot in the sidebar and press New session. A panel asks "What do you want to do?" — pick Check my server, choose your server, and start.

The assistant connects, looks around and answers in plain English. It starts in Read mode, which means it is physically prevented from changing anything. When you want it to fix something, switch to Execute and it will ask permission before each change.

Detail: The AI assistant and The safety switch.

Minute 10 — Watch your website from the outside

Go to Uptime, click Add monitor, and paste your website address. That is the whole setup. Within a minute you will see whether it is up, how fast it responds, and how many days are left on its security certificate.

Detail: Uptime monitoring.

What to do next

• Add your other servers. The health page is most useful when everything you own is on it.
• Invite your developer instead of sharing your password — see Team members.
• Skim the guided tasks in the New session panel. There are 40 of them, and the list is a good tour of what the assistant is able to do: Guided tasks.