Becoming a provider

Welcome. Every account can host instances as well as rent them. The Gigahost hypervisor agent turns one physical Linux server into a provider host. Your renters rent instances on it; these pages call an instance on your host a rental, and the operating system inside it the guest.

From enrollment to your first payout

1. Checking the requirements

   The requirements below tell you what the server needs. You also choose a home host or a cloud host.

2. Setting up the host

   You install the agent, prepare its storage, write its configuration, enroll it and run it under systemd, as described in Setting up a host.

3. Setting what it earns

   You set prices on the host’s Pricing tab or with ghost provider set-pricing; Pricing and SLA explains each one.

4. Cloud host only: registering its public addresses

   Each address needs to pass its check; see Registering public addresses.

5. Resuming rentals

   Once you have inspected the host, you can open it to renters; see Controlling rental admission.

6. Checking it with a test VM

   A small test VM on the host shows whether its connectivity works; see Checking a new host.

7. Setting your payout address and requesting payouts

   You can request a payout once earnings are available; see Payouts.

The website’s Provider page shows an account without hosts how to start, and Provider › Add a host (/provider/hosts/new) has the steps that add a host, from installing the agent through the enrollment token to setting what it earns and opening it for rentals.

Requirements at a glance

• A dedicated x86-64 server with hardware virtualization enabled in firmware.
• Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, or 26.04, or Debian 12 or 13. Proxmox VE is not supported, because it runs its own QEMU stack beside which libvirt cannot be installed.
• A working systemd installation and root access.
• Persistent SSD or NVMe storage for guest disks and hypervisor state.
• Stable outbound Internet access and accurate system time.
• A Gigahost account, any account. You create a host enrollment token from it when you enroll the host.

Home mode and cloud mode each add a few requirements of their own.

Home host or cloud host

You choose the mode before enrolling the host.

	Home host	Cloud host
Setting	mode = "home_gateway"	mode = "cloud_routed"
Network it needs	Only outbound connectivity; suitable for hosts behind NAT	Additional public IPv4 addresses that the server’s provider routes or attaches to the server
A rental’s public address	On a gateway that Gigahost runs	One of the server’s additional addresses, routed through a router VM that the agent runs on the host, or a Shared IP of the host’s own address
Details	Home mode	Cloud mode

A host has one mode. To change modes, you enroll a new host identity; the previous record is kept for tenant history.

What you earn

The prices you set are what you earn, and renters pay each of them plus the platform’s share of 15%. You set:

• compute earnings, per vCPU or as a total for the whole host, which follow each size’s RAM;
• on a cloud host, an amount per TiB of a rental’s traffic and per rental’s public address.

A home host earns nothing for traffic and addresses: its customers pay their gateway for them. You also earn what your customers pay for the local backups on your host, less the same share. How each price works, and how to set it, is on Pricing and SLA.

Your obligations

SLA tiers

Each host has an SLA, chosen with its prices.

SLA	Downtime credit	Payout hold
99%	1× the rental’s base price for the downtime	1 day
99.9%	5×	5 days
99.99%	20×	20 days

Each credit is debited from your earnings as what the rental would have earned you for the downtime, times its multiplier, even below zero. The customer receives the credit at you only. It pays your later charges to that customer before their balance does, and it can never be withdrawn. Credits also hold back payouts; see When earnings can be paid out. Your hosts’ outages and what each cost are listed under Uptime and outages.

Notice before you retire a host

When a host still has rentals, its customers get at least seven full days of notice before it is retired; see Retiring a host with notice.

The host-creation charge

The first successful enrollment of a host posts the configured non-refundable host-creation charge; see The host-creation charge.