vantage-docs/docs/hq/accounts-and-signup.md

id, title, sidebar_label

id	title	sidebar_label
accounts-and-signup	Accounts and signup	Accounts and signup

Vantage HQ, at vantage-hq.hostxtra.co.uk, is where you manage the account behind your instances: your team, your instances, their licences and billing.

An account is a team, not a person

One account holds many people and many instances. Everyone in it has an account role:

Role	Can
owner	Everything, including billing
admin	Invite people, create instances, grant instance access
member	Read what the account holds

Reading is open to any signed-in member. Every mutation except changing your own password requires owner or admin. Billing is owner-only.

The three words are the same as the control plane's roles, on purpose but they are separate things. Your account role governs the portal; your role inside an instance governs that instance.

Signing up

Signup is account-first. Creating an account creates the account and you; it does not create a Vantage instance. Nothing exists in any control plane until you later create or link one.

1. Go to the signup form.
2. Enter your name, email and a password.
3. Check your email and click the verification link.

:::info Verify before you can sign in An unverified account gets a distinct "check your email" message rather than a generic authentication failure the address is already known to be yours, so there is nothing to protect by being vague. :::

Verification links are valid for 24 hours. The token is 32 random bytes and only its SHA-256 hash is stored, so a leaked database yields no working links.

If the verification email cannot be sent, the signup is rolled back rather than left stranded retry rather than assuming a half-created account is in the way.

Signing in

Email and password. The session is a cookie, separate from the control plane's: signing in to HQ does not sign you in to an instance, and vice versa.

What comes next

You want	Go to
A Vantage instance we run	Cloud instances
To license an install you run	Self-hosted instances
To add colleagues	People and roles
To understand tiers and limits	Licensing and entitlements

The portal layout

Three destinations: Overview, People, Billing.

Settings lives in the account menu rather than the nav, because it is your password rather than a place. The appearance toggle is there too.

Overview lists your instances. Each is one record, closed to a row and open to its licence contents, members and actions. It opens by default when it is your only instance or when it needs attention, and your manual choice is remembered.

There is deliberately no "your plan" card in the sidebar: tier, limits and expiry belong to a licence, and a licence belongs to one instance. An account with a Free cloud instance and a Professional self-hosted one has no single plan to show.