Disposable Linux boxes · Ho Chi Minh City
A Linux box, about two seconds away.
A box does not boot when you ask for it — it wakes from a snapshot, with its processes, its sockets and its caches already warm. From a laptop in another country that is 2.8 s to a running box and 1.9 s to a shell prompt. Boxes stay private until you share them, and you throw them away when you are done.
ssh nitro.vn new scratch
Free while nitro is in preview, and preview is invite-only. Your boxes keep running until you delete them.
Inside the host: resuming a snapshot
344 ms
tim@scratch:~$ ▌
Three commands, then you are working
-
01
Make it
ssh nitro.vn new scratchreturns a prompt in about two seconds from a laptop in Vietnam. Bun, Python 3 and git are already installed. -
02
Work in it
Run a server on any port from 3000 to 9999 and it is reachable over HTTPS immediately. No tunnel, no port forwarding, no certificate to install.
-
03
Throw it away
ssh nitro.vn rm scratchdestroys the box and its disk. The next one is another two seconds away, so deleting is cheap.
Every box has a URL you can guess
Your project and your handle, joined. The port goes in the URL, not the hostname — so one certificate covers every service you run.
| Address | Reaches |
|---|---|
| scratch-tim.nitrolet.com | port 8000 in the box |
| scratch-tim.nitrolet.com:5173 | port 5173 in the box |
| ssh scratch-tim | a shell in the box |
The name splits at the last hyphen, so a project may contain hyphens and your handle never does.
Private until you say otherwise
A new box answers nobody but you. Requests without your session get 401 at the edge and never reach the machine. When you do share one, the edge passes your visitor's identity into the box as request headers, so whatever you are running gets a login for free.
- Share it
- ssh nitro.vn share set-public scratch
- Take it back
- ssh nitro.vn share set-private scratch
What preview actually is
nitro runs on one machine in Ho Chi Minh City. Saying so is cheaper for both of us than finding out. These are the limits as they are enforced today, not as they are planned.
Per account
- Boxes running at once
- 3
- Boxes being created at once
- 1
- Persistent disks
- 2 · 20 GiB total
- Saved snapshots
- 10
- Each box
- 1 vCPU · 512 MiB
Going over one of these returns an error naming which of your own things to delete. The host has its own ceiling as well; hitting that one is our problem, and it says so.
Say the quiet parts
- Invite-only. Signing up needs a code. There is one machine and no waiting list worth the name.
- Nothing idles out. A box runs until you delete it. There is no automatic eviction, so nothing reclaims a box you forgot — which also means nothing surprises you by taking one away.
- A box's own disk is disposable. Deleting a box destroys it. A volume is the durable thing: flushing one publishes it to object storage, and it survives the loss of this host.
- One machine, one region. No redundancy, no uptime commitment, and a maintenance window is whenever it needs one. Keep your work in git.
- You need an SSH key. Register one in
the dashboard before your first box; it is what makes
sshinto a box work at all.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure on this page names where it was measured from, because the same operation has very different numbers depending on where the stopwatch is.
| Claim | Measured from | Sample | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.8 s — create a box | a client outside the host (client-remote) | p50, n=30 | 2026-08 |
| 1.9 s — ssh nitro.vn new to a prompt | a laptop in Vietnam, wall clock | typical | 2026-08 |
| 344 ms — snapshot resume | inside the host driver — not what your terminal sees | median | 2026-08 |
Reproduce them with bun scripts/nitro/bench-contract.ts --vantage client-remote.
Make one and break it
Nothing to install. You need an account, an invite code and an SSH key registered to it — then a box is one command away. If it goes wrong, delete it; that is what it is for.
ssh nitro.vn new scratch