Quickstart: your first session in 5 minutes

The fastest way to understand DeskBoot is to launch a session. Here's the full path. Plan for about 5 minutes for signup and 5 to 10 minutes for the first instance to provision.

1. Sign up

Open https://deskboot.store/signup and click "Sign in with Google". We don't store passwords — Google handles authentication.

2. Verify your phone

After login you'll land on the dashboard. The first thing it asks for is phone verification. Pick your country from the searchable dropdown, type your number without the leading zero, click Send code, then enter the 6-digit code we SMS you.

3. Add a payment card

Sessions cost money to run on AWS, so we need a card on file before you can launch one. Go to Billing → "Add card". We verify the card with a $1 hold (refunded immediately) and then unlock a free $5 signup credit so your first session is on us.

We use Paystack for card processing. Cards from any country work for USD payment; Kenyan cards can additionally pay via M-Pesa, bank transfer, or USSD if you switch your Settings → Display currency to KES.

4. Launch a session

Click "Launch a session" on the dashboard. You'll see a form with four choices:

• Operating system. Windows Server 2022/2019, Ubuntu 24.04/22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 41, Kali Linux. "Windows 11-style" runs on Server 2022 with desktop experience — Microsoft licensing prohibits real Win 11 on shared cloud infrastructure.
• Instance size. Starter (2 vCPU, 4 GB) is enough for most tasks. Pro (8 vCPU, 32 GB) for heavier work. Pricing shown in $/hour.
• Region. us-east-1 (Virginia), us-east-2 (Ohio), eu-west-1 (Ireland), ap-south-1 (Mumbai), af-south-1 (Cape Town). Pick the closest one to you. Kali isn't available in Cape Town yet.
• Password (optional). Leave blank to auto- generate a strong one. We KMS-encrypt it and show it once on launch.

5. Wait for provisioning

Ubuntu and Windows usually finish in 3-5 minutes. Debian, Fedora and Kali take 6-10 minutes because their AMIs don't ship the SSM agent and we install it at first boot.

The session status flips from PROVISIONING → RUNNING when it's ready. Refresh the sessions list if you don't see it update automatically.

6. Connect

Open the session detail page. You'll see two ways to connect:

• RDP (all OSes). Download the .rdp file. Double- click it to open Microsoft Remote Desktop (Mac/Windows) or any RDP client. Login uses the credentials shown on the page.
• SSH (Linux only). Download the .pem private key. chmod 600 keyname.pem then ssh -i keyname.pem deskboot@<public-ip>.

7. Stop when you're done

Click "Stop" on the session detail page. Compute billing pauses immediately; you keep paying ~$0.08/GB/month for the EBS volume while stopped. Click "Terminate" to delete the volume and stop all charges for this session.

That's the entire loop. Most users do it once or twice and the rest is muscle memory. Questions: /contact.