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Quick start

This page takes you from ordering to your first successful S3 command.

Step 1 — Order a plan

Choose a tier and a datacenter region, then order through the store or the client area. Not sure which tier? See choosing a tier.

Step 2 — Receive your credentials

Once your service is provisioned, you'll get an email containing:

  • your S3 access key
  • your S3 secret key
  • your node's HTTPS endpoint URL

Keep these safe

Your secret key is shown so you can configure your client — treat it like a password. See Credentials & rotation.

Step 3 — Set your whitelist IP (required)

Your endpoint is locked to a single IP address for security. Until you set your whitelist IP in the Client Area, nothing can connect.

  1. Sign in to the Client Area and open your service.
  2. Set your whitelist IP to the public IP of the machine that will access the storage.
  3. Save. Only that IP can reach your endpoint.

One IP only

Exactly one IP can access your service at a time. If your public IP changes (home ISP, VPN, new server), update the whitelist IP or connections will be refused. Not sure of your IP? Visit ifconfig.me from the machine that will connect.

Prefer to script it? You can change the whitelist IP from the command line — see Updating your whitelist IP.

Step 4 — Configure your S3 client

Point any S3 client at your endpoint URL and enter your keys. If your client asks for a region and you don't have one, use us-east-1 as a placeholder — see Endpoint & credentials.

Step 5 — Make your first request

aws --endpoint-url "https://YOUR-ENDPOINT/" s3 ls

rclone lsd zendrive:

s3cmd ls

If you see your buckets (or an empty list with no error), you're connected. Full, copy-paste configs for each tool are on the client examples page.

Step 6 — Browse and download

ZenDRIVE S3 Access is read-only — you list and download data:

# list what's in a bucket
aws --endpoint-url "https://YOUR-ENDPOINT/" s3 ls s3://bucket-name/
# download a file
aws --endpoint-url "https://YOUR-ENDPOINT/" s3 cp s3://bucket-name/file.txt ./

What if it doesn't connect?

Work through connection errors — the most common causes are a mistyped endpoint, a wrong key, or a missing https://.