From payment confirmed to first token.

What arrives

One message, under 5 minutes after the payment confirms. It contains everything you need and nothing you have to click through.

First connection

Nothing to accept, no agent to install. If you gave us a public key in the configurator it is already in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

$ ssh root@203.0.113.42
# Then, before anything else — the fingerprint in the delivery message
# must match the one printed here:
$ ssh-keygen -lf /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub

If you sent a key, turn the password off. It costs one command and removes the only credential that can be guessed.

# Confirm your key works FIRST — in a second terminal, still logged in here.
$ sed -i 's/^#\?PasswordAuthentication.*/PasswordAuthentication no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
$ systemctl reload ssh

Verify the hardware

Do this in the first ten minutes. You have a machine you have not seen, and the SLA clock on a hardware fault starts when you tell us.

$ nvidia-smi --query-gpu=index,name,serial,memory.total,pcie.link.gen.current --format=csv
index, name, serial, memory.total [MiB], pcie.link.gen.current
0, NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3, 1650123456789, 81559 MiB, 5
1, NVIDIA H100 80GB HBM3, 1650123456790, 81559 MiB, 5

# On a multi-GPU node, check the topology matches what you paid for.
# NV# means NVLink; PIX/PHB/SYS mean the traffic goes over PCIe.
$ nvidia-smi topo -m

# Hold every card at load for two minutes and watch the clock it settles at.
$ nvidia-smi -q -d PERFORMANCE,TEMPERATURE,CLOCK | grep -E 'Slowdown|SW Power|Graphics *:'

# Disks: confirm the count and the model against the delivery message.
$ lsblk -d -o NAME,MODEL,SIZE,ROTA
$ nvme list

What is preinstalled

Pick an operating system in the configurator, and optionally one stack on top of it. Everything below is written before delivery, not downloaded on first boot.

Every Linux image, whichever stack you pick, already has a working NVIDIA driver, CUDA, cuDNN and NCCL. You are free to replace all of it — it is your root, and reinstalling costs nothing and is not rate-limited.

Containers and CUDA

Docker and the NVIDIA container toolkit are installed and configured. The check below is worth thirty seconds, because a container that cannot see the cards fails in a confusing way much later.

$ docker run --rm --gpus all nvidia/cuda:12.8.0-base-ubuntu24.04 nvidia-smi

# Multi-GPU jobs also need shared memory and IPC, which the default limits break.
# These three flags are the usual cause of a silent NCCL hang:
$ docker run --rm --gpus all --ipc=host --shm-size=16g --ulimit memlock=-1 …

Serving a model

The shortest useful path from a delivered machine to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Substitute your own model; the flags are what matter.

$ docker run -d --name vllm --gpus all --ipc=host -p 8000:8000 \
    vllm/vllm-openai:latest \
    --model meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct \
    --max-model-len 8192 \
    --gpu-memory-utilization 0.92

# On a multi-GPU node, shard across every card in the box:
$ … --tensor-parallel-size 4

# Then, from your own machine:
$ curl http://203.0.113.42:8000/v1/models

Whether a given model fits on a given machine is arithmetic, not opinion — weights, plus a KV cache that grows with context length. The configurator does that arithmetic for every configuration before you pay, and the VRAM sizing guide shows the formula so you can check ours.

Disks and storage

Disks are handed over raw beyond the system volume. We impose no RAID level, because the right one depends on whether you are holding checkpoints you cannot lose or a dataset you can re-download in an hour.

# Check what is unused first — this destroys data on the named devices.
$ lsblk

$ mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/nvme1n1 /dev/nvme2n1
$ mkfs.ext4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 /dev/md0
$ mkdir -p /scratch && mount /dev/md0 /scratch
$ echo '/dev/md0 /scratch ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2' >> /etc/fstab

Additional NVMe, archive HDD and off-machine snapshots are monthly options, added in the configurator or afterwards. Local disks are not backed up by us and never will be — see snapshots below.

Firewall and ports

Everything is open inbound except what your own machine blocks: there is no network filter in front of you, which is deliberate and puts the responsibility here. Outbound port 25 is the single exception, closed upstream until you ask.

$ ufw default deny incoming
$ ufw default allow outgoing
$ ufw allow 22/tcp
$ ufw allow from 198.51.100.7 to any port 8000 proto tcp
$ ufw --force enable

# Safer than opening a port at all: keep the service on localhost
# and tunnel to it from your own machine.
$ ssh -N -L 8000:127.0.0.1:8000 root@203.0.113.42

IPMI and reinstalling

Out-of-band access is on every machine, on its own address. It is how you recover a box you have locked yourself out of, at three in the morning, without asking anyone.

A clean reinstall to any image we offer is requested from us and takes about the same time as the original delivery. It costs nothing, there is no limit on how often, and the machine keeps its addresses. Everything on the disks is destroyed by it — that is the point of a reinstall, and there is no undo.

Snapshots

Optional, monthly, off the machine. If you do not buy them, no copy of your data exists anywhere but your own disks — which is the correct default for most of what runs on a GPU, and a disaster for the rest.

Ending the term

A monthly term stops at the end of the paid month, with no notice period and no cancellation fee. What happens next is not reversible, so it is spelled out here rather than in a footnote.

1. Nothing renews by itself. There is no card on file and no direct debit — a term continues only because you paid for the next one.
2. The public port is cut at the moment the term ends. The machine stops being reachable immediately, not at the end of a grace day.
3. Disks are erased within the hour. Cryptographic erase, then a full overwrite. There is no window during which your data still exists somewhere.
4. Snapshots go with it. If you bought them, they are deleted in the same pass.
5. The address returns to the pool. After a hold, and only once it is clean.