Skip to content

Getting Started

Prefer video?

Safespring has a series of video guides for Compute that walk through the most common tasks if you prefer to follow along visually.

Log in to the dashboard

Go to the Horizon dashboard for your site and log in with your credentials. After login you land on the Overview page, which shows your current resource usage against your quota limits.

Overview dashboard

Safespring organizes resources into domains and projects. Each project is an isolated environment — a common setup is separate projects for test and production. See Sites and account structure for details.

Preparations

Before launching an instance, make sure you have an SSH key pair and a security group ready.

SSH key pair

A key pair is required to log in to your instance — password login is disabled on most images. If you do not have one yet, see the SSH key pairs how-to for instructions on generating a key and importing it into the dashboard.

To import an existing key, go to Compute → Key Pairs and click Import Public Key.

Security group

A security group controls inbound traffic to your instances. All inbound traffic is denied by default, so you need a security group that allows SSH (port 22) before you can connect.

Go to Network → Security Groups, click Create Security Group, give it a name (for example allow-ssh), and add a rule for SSH restricted to your IP address.

Security groups

For detailed instructions, see Networking — Security groups.

Launch your first instance

In the left menu, go to Compute → Instances and click Launch Instance.

Launch instance

The wizard has several tabs — work through them in order.

Details

Give your instance a name.

Source

Set Select Boot Source to Image and pick an OS image from the list (for example Ubuntu 24.04).

Image selection

Leave Create New Volume set to Yes and Delete Volume on Instance Delete to No — this gives you a persistent root disk that survives instance deletion. For a full explanation of boot storage options (ephemeral vs. volume-backed), see the Volume documentation.

Flavor

Pick a flavor that matches your workload. Flavors starting with b2 use central persistent storage and pair well with volume-backed boot. Flavors starting with l2 use fast local storage. See the Flavors documentation for a full breakdown.

Networks

Attach exactly one network:

Network Use case
public Public IPv4 and IPv6, directly reachable from the internet
default Private address with NAT for outbound internet access — not directly reachable from outside
private Private address, no internet access

Network selection

For your first instance, choose public. Instances on the default network have outbound internet access but cannot be reached directly from outside, so you will not be able to SSH in without first having a host on the public network to go through.

No routers, subnets, or floating IPs needed

Safespring uses Calico-based pure layer 3 networking. Unlike a standard OpenStack setup, you do not need to create virtual routers, configure subnets, or assign floating IPs — just attach one network and the instance is reachable at its assigned IP address straight away.

Attach exactly one network

Each network assigns a default gateway via DHCP. Attaching more than one causes conflicting gateways and unstable connectivity.

For a full description of the networking architecture, see the Networking documentation.

Security Groups

Select the security group you created in the preparations step.

Key Pair

Select the key pair you imported in the preparations step.

Configuration (Cloud-init)

Optionally, paste a cloud-init script in the Customization Script field to automate configuration at first boot — installing packages, creating users, or running scripts.

Cloud-init configuration

For ready-to-use examples, see the Cloud-init how-to.

Launch

Click Launch Instance. The instance will appear in the instances list and reach Running status within a minute.

Connect to the instance

Connect via SSH using the default user for your image and the IP address shown in the instances list:

ssh <default-user>@<ip-address>

The default username depends on the image:

Image Default user
ubuntu-* ubuntu
debian-* debian
almalinux-* almalinux
rocky-* rocky
cirros cirros

Password login is disabled — the SSH key you selected during launch is used for authentication.

Next steps