This article is the 3rd day of the Advent Calendar 2021 of Wazaterm, an online Linux terminal for hackers.

Let's start using Wazaterm

Now, let's get started. you need to follow the steps below before you can start a terminal with Wazaterm.

1. Purchase credits
2. Start the terminal.
   1. Choose your hostname and user name.
   2. Choose a region
   3. Choose the storage size
   4. Select CPU and Memory
   5. Launch 🚀

Now let's look at them one by one.

1. purchase credits

Click the icon in the upper right corner to open the Billing page.

Wazaterm is a prepaid system. $1 USD = 1.00 credit. You can use the Pricing page to see how much you need. For example

$1.81 USD / month

Memory:1G, CPU:2 Cores, Storage:10G, 160 hours (8 hours* 20 days), Ohio region.

$7.3 USD / month

Example 2 (Development for medium size of the project) Memory:4G, CPU:2 core, Storage:30G, 160 hours (8 hours* 20 days), Tokyo region.

Let's start with the minimum purchase price of $5.

Right now, we're giving away a free $3 (expires in 3 days) credit to a few people a day! Try it out! 2

2. Launch the terminal

Now, go back to the top page and click on the "Launch new terminal" button. We will now configure the terminal we are going to launch.

1. Decide the host name and user name.

The host name will be your domain name. The user name is the username on Linux. By default, your Wazaterm user name (github user name) is entered, but you can change it. For example, if your user name is shohey1226 and your host name is foo, you can access the server as follows

$ ssh shohey1226@foo.wazaterm.com

2. Region selection

There are currently 5 regions supported, try the one closest to you. As long as you don't mind the latency, you should be able to use Terminal without any stress. (Since it is a CLI, the amount of transfer is small)

3. Determine the storage size.

Storage includes the OS and the swap area. The size of the swap is the actual memory size. Note that storage will be charged even if Terminal is not running. The size of the OS is small at first, but if you install a lot of packages, it will grow quickly, so it is better not to make it too small. You can increase the size of the OS, but you can't decrease it later. As I will explain later, I hope you will save money by archiving your unused files to Google Drive.　In the past, HDDs were slow and you could work with NFS home directories, but now that I have experienced SSDs, I can't work with any other storage. It will cost you more, but I hope you will bear with me.

4. Select CPU & Memory

You need to stop Terminal, but you can change it later. It's also good to switch between them depending on your project. I'm developing on 2CPUs and 8g memory.

5. Launch 🚀

Press "Launch" to start it up. After a few minutes, you should be able to use the terminal. (Depending on the number of cores in your CPU, it may boot faster or slower. (Depending on the number of CPU cores and other factors, it may be faster or slower to start.) There is a lot of load at boot time, so you may see a lot of loading at uptime, but it will stabilize soon.