Getting started

Create an account

An account holds your email address, your password and the way you pay. Every project you work in belongs to it.

1. Open the console and choose Sign up.
2. Enter your email address, a password and your organisation’s name.
3. Confirm the address from the link in your inbox.
4. Under Billing, add a card or a SEPA direct debit mandate.

Billing starts when the first resource exists, not when the account does. Billing sets out the unit, the monthly price and the invoice.

Create a project

A project holds servers, volumes, networks, API tokens and the people who work on them. Its servers share one pool of outbound traffic, and the invoice lists each project on its own.

Your account starts with one project, and the console adds more. Use one for each app or each stage, such as acme-shop and acme-shop-staging.

A private network belongs to one project, so keep servers that talk to each other in the same project.

Add an SSH key

Every server takes your public key at first boot, and password logins over SSH are off. Add your key to the project once and give it a short name, such as me.

$ lc ssh-key add me --file ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
Added me (ED25519 SHA256:q3Rk...v0Yc)

If you have no key yet, SSH keys shows how to make one.

Create a server

From the console

1. Choose Create server and pick a region, such as ee1 in Tallinn.
2. Pick an image: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Arch Linux or one of your own.
3. Pick a plan. The s-2 plan suits a web app, an API or a small database.
4. Tick your SSH key and give the server a name.
5. Choose Create. The server’s addresses appear as soon as it is running.

From the command line

Install lc as the command line page shows. Then one command creates the server and prints its addresses:

$ lc server create web-1 --plan s-2 --region ee1 \
    --image debian-13 --ssh-key me
Creating web-1 in ee1 ... running
IPv4  203.0.113.24
IPv6  2001:db8:4c1::1

The median from this command to a server open to SSH is 38 seconds over the last 30 days. By then your key is in place and cloud-init has run.

Log in

Log in as root with the key you chose at creation:

$ ssh root@203.0.113.24
root@web-1:~#

From here the server is yours to set up. Install packages, add users and deploy as you would on any Linux machine.

A stopped server is billed like a running one, because it keeps its disk and its addresses. Deleting it ends the billing, so take a snapshot first if you want to keep the disk.

Next steps

• Put your servers on a private network and close their public ports with a firewall.
• Add a volume for data that should outlive the server.
• Read how billing counts hours, or see every price on the pricing page.
• Describe the same setup as code with Terraform.