Getting Started

Getting Started with MarQi Cloud
From signup to a running VM in minutes

This guide walks you through your first deployment on MarQi Cloud: creating an account, launching a KVM virtual machine, connecting securely over WireGuard, and putting a production workload live. Everything here runs on open source infrastructure with no vendor lock-in and no egress fees.

1. Create your account

Sign up and tell us which workload you are bringing over. Because every MarQi Cloud account is engineer-reviewed, we can size your first machine correctly instead of leaving you to guess. If you already know what you need, our transparent VM pricing starts at $8/month with VPN, load balancer, snapshots and backups included in every plan.

2. Pick a zone

Choose the region your workload should live in. Each MarQi Cloud zone is a separate data center with its own storage cluster, so you get data locality and predictable latency. See our zones for current locations — our primary zone is in Alpharetta, GA, serving the Atlanta metro with sub-5ms latency.

3. Launch your first KVM virtual machine

MarQi Cloud runs the KVM hypervisor on multi-core hosts with terabytes of RAM and multiple network paths. Select an image, size the vCPU, RAM and block storage, and deploy. Ubuntu LTS is our default across hosts, and UEFI/TPM support means Windows Server guests run as first-class citizens too. Ready-made images live on our templates and images page; the underlying hardware is described in detail under compute platform.

4. Connect over WireGuard

Every account gets private networking. Instead of exposing management ports to the public internet, you connect to an isolated VPC over a WireGuard tunnel. Import the configuration we generate, bring the interface up, and your workstation is on the same private network as your instances. Full setup detail is on the networking and VPN page.

5. Attach storage and turn on protection

Block volumes are provisioned from a Ceph/PetaSAN cluster and replicated three times across separate nodes, so a disk or host failure does not cost you data. Schedule snapshots and backups before you go live — point-in-time recovery is included, not an upsell. The architecture behind it is documented under storage architecture.

6. Go to production

Put a load balancer in front of your instances, point DNS at it, and enable alerting. Our NOC watches compute, storage and network 24/7/365 — see status and monitoring for what we track and what you can hook into. From that point you are running on infrastructure you could, in principle, take with you: open source hypervisor, open source storage, standard images.

Bringing your own hardware?

If you already own servers, you do not have to replatform. MarQi Cloud can put your existing hardware and our cloud in a single VPC — that is our hybrid cloud model. If you would rather rack your own gear in our facility, start with colocation and BYO hardware. For GPU training and inference workloads, see GPUs for AI/ML.

Need a hand?

Our engineers do the onboarding, not a chatbot. Talk to an engineer and we will map your current stack to a MarQi Cloud deployment plan, or open a ticket through the support portal once you are live.