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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

You log in to the machine with your SSH key; there are no passwords. 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 own label for this reservation, so you can tell your reservations apart. It isn't part of the machine's address. 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, automatically, at the start of the reservation — 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), the machine is prepared for you: the previous renter's account is removed and the machine restarts once. The reservation page shows Preparing your machine… until the machine reports that it's ready, then Your machine is ready. That usually takes a few minutes. We also email you when the reservation goes live.

The reservation page, and that email, show your SSH command with the machine's port:

bash
ssh -p <port> renter@ssh.gputorent.com

For example, on a Mac Studio with port 2211:

bash
ssh -p 2211 renter@ssh.gputorent.com
  • The host is always ssh.gputorent.com and the user is always renter. Only the port changes from machine to machine, and it's never 22, so copy the command from the reservation page.
  • The first time you connect, SSH asks you to confirm the machine's fingerprint. Type yes.
  • If your key isn't the default file, add -i ~/.ssh/your_key.

If SSH says Permission denied (publickey) or the connection times out, see Troubleshooting. To reach Jupyter or another web UI on the machine, see VS Code and Jupyter; for the desktop of a Mac Studio, see Remote desktop on a Mac Studio.

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, everything on the machine is permanently erased, including your home folder, the tools you installed and the account itself. There are no backups.