Your first hour with ServerExpress

You’ve ordered. Here’s what happens next, in order, and roughly how long each step takes.

When your server is ready

Cloud VPS instances build automatically. Once payment clears, the VM is cloned, given its IP, and booted — usually inside two or three minutes. You’ll get an email the moment it’s up.

Dedicated servers are different. Most are racked and handed over the same working day, but if the exact spec you picked isn’t already built, we’ll tell you a real date rather than let you sit and wonder.

Either way, everything lives in the client area. That’s where the credentials are, and it’s the only place we’ll ever show them.

Finding your login details

Open your service in the client area and look for Root access. The password is hidden until you click to reveal it — that’s deliberate, so a screenshare or a shoulder doesn’t leak it.

For a Linux VPS you’ll connect over SSH:

ssh root@YOUR_IP

Windows servers use RDP on port 3389 with the Administrator account.

If SSH refuses the password, check you’re on the right IP — the panel shows the primary address, and a server with several IPs only listens for SSH on the one you configured.

The four things worth doing first

  1. Change the root password. We generate a strong one, but it has passed through our systems. passwd takes five seconds.
  2. Add an SSH key and turn off password auth. This single change removes almost all of the brute-force noise the internet will throw at you.
  3. Set your rDNS. If the box sends mail, this isn’t optional — see Reverse DNS and IP addresses.
  4. Take a snapshot. A clean snapshot before you install anything is the cheapest insurance there is — see Snapshots and backups for what one does and doesn’t protect you from.

If something’s wrong

Open a ticket from the client area rather than emailing us directly. Tickets carry your service context automatically, so we can look at the actual machine instead of asking you which one you mean.

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