Your server hosting company will provide you with the username, password, and IP address of your server. You will then need to use a terminal application to interact with the server via text based prompts. The default administrator user is usually called root and it has unlimited power in the operating system. root access is required for admin-level commands. A standard non-privledged user will be used for day to day stuff.

You will need to access your server using a CLI (command line interface). If you use a UNIX based operating system like Mac OS, then you can use the built-in terminal app for this.

See What is Terminal on Mac guide

To access your server in terminal, you will use the command ssh root@<ipaddress>





If you use a Windows PC, then you will need a terminal application such as PuTTY. You can learn about it on their website putty.org. You need to download the correct version for your machine...most likely this one (64-bit x86:putty-64bit-0.79-installer.msi)

To access your server in PuTTY, you will enter root@<ipaddress> into the Host Name field.