Getting Started with Superb Flex Cloud

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Sign Up for a Flex Cloud account

*If you already have a Flex Cloud account you can skip this step

Opening a Flex Cloud account is free, you don’t pay for anything until you’ve created your servers. For those not familiar with Superb Flex Cloud, it is a pay as you go “ala carte” hosting solution. There’s no need to fear running out of hard-drive space, memory, bandwidth, or anything else that might jeopardize performance; you can either explicitly control your servers, or create auto-scaling rules to ensure that your VM is always operating smoothly.

To get started follow this link: https://www.superb.net/cloud-hosting/flex-cloud, here you can use the cost estimator to get an idea of what your monthly bill should look like.

Click “Sign Up” to continue.

This will take you to the order form, where you can select your options/additional services. Services range from MS SQL Licenses to MS SQL Databases.  However the only required option at this point is the location of the Data Center (You still can still purchase Add-ons on existing accounts if you change your mind later). Feel free to change the location if you have a preference for one location over another, otherwise the differences are negligible.

Once you are satisfied with your choice, click Add to Cart.

Review your order, and checkout.

Once you checkout, and complete your purchase your Flex account should be ready to use.

Get your FlexCloud Account ID

Log into myCP, in the top left you will see the Account drop down, select the Flex Cloud account you created. This will show you your AccountID, in this case it’s 718008.

 Generate an API key

From the myCP page with your Flex Cloud account selected, select “Generate/Regenerate API Key” under Cloud Services:

This will take you to the key generation page:

Here you can generate your key. Keep your key safe, as it will only be shown once after you click it, don’t worry if it is lost or compromised, you can easily return to this page to generate a new key, this will void any previous keys.

Begin Using the API

Now that you have your AccountID and your API key, you can begin making requests. The API relies on basic-authentication where accountID is your username and your API key is the password. To learn how to use the API and what methods are available checkout the API guide: https://confluence.dev.superb.net/display/AD/Superb+Cloud+API

This guide shows all the available methods and parameters for each route, and includes example Curl requests that you can execute via console.

Account Credit

Flex Cloud accounts use a prepay-crediting system, to see your hourly account usage click on “View cloud usage”. Follow the “Manage cloud servers” link to see your current balance:

Here you can set up auto-refill to ensure that your account maintains a positive balance:

You can also check your credit balance via the API: https://confluence.dev.superb.net/display/AD/Get+Credit

Ordering IP Addresses

Every Flex Cloud account includes 12 IP Addresses, this means you can create up to 12 VMs (If you use multiple IPs per machine than this number will be less). To order more IPs, login into myCP and click Order Upgrades / Add-Ons, links to this can be found either under “Account Options” or in the Plan Admin links section:

This should bring you to the add-on order form, where you can put however many IPs you need:

Scroll down and click “Next”

It will take you to the checkout to complete your order. Here it will ask for usage justifications for your IP order. This is purely a precaution to deter would be spammers from obtaining large blocks of IP addresses, so most other uses will be accepted without issue.

Once you click “Complete Order”, it should take about 1 hour to complete but it can take up to 24hrs to process. You will receive an email when the IP’s are ready to use!

Tips

-For some methods the success status returned indicates that the request has been scheduled, not that it has been completed. For example when creating a VM even though the request was successful, it may take several minutes to provision the resources, build, and startup your VM.

-When incorporating API calls into your scripts/code using a tool such as Postman (a Chrome extension) can be extremely helpful when validating the format of your requests.