---
id: accounts-and-signup
title: Accounts and signup
sidebar_label: 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](./cloud-instances.md)                       |
| To license an install you run  | [Self-hosted instances](./self-hosted-instances.md)           |
| To add colleagues              | [People and roles](./people-and-roles.md)                     |
| To understand tiers and limits | [Licensing and entitlements](./licensing-and-entitlements.md) |

## 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.
