Instance states
Every instance is in exactly one of eight states. The badge on the Instances page, the badge on the instance detail page, and the status field returned by the API all report the same value.
The states
| State | Transitional | What it means | What it bills | What you can do from it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
creating | yes | Your deploy was accepted and Superheat is provisioning the slice and pulling the image | nothing | Wait, or destroy |
starting | yes | A stopped instance is coming back on the same machine with the same disk | nothing | Wait, or destroy |
running | no | The workload is up and the connect details are published | GPU: the offer's hourly price for the whole slice, metered by the second | Connect over SSH, open JupyterLab, read logs, stop, destroy |
stopping | yes | The workload is shutting down; the disk is retained | nothing | Wait |
stopped | no | The workload is down; your disk and your slot on that machine are held for you | Disk: your disk size multiplied by the storage rate per GB-hour | Start, destroy |
destroying | yes | Teardown is in progress and the slice is being released | nothing | Wait |
destroyed | no | Terminal. The disk is deleted and the offer is back on the marketplace | nothing | Nothing. Destroyed instances are hidden from the list unless you ask for them |
error | no | Provisioning or a transition failed | nothing | Read logs, destroy |
error bills nothing, but it is a placed state: the GPUs stay reserved for your instance until it is destroyed, and they do not come back into the offer's available_units. Destroy it to release them to the marketplace.
Transitional states
Four states — creating, starting, stopping and destroying — are transitional: Superheat is completing the change, no meter is running, and nothing you do moves it along faster — though a creating or starting instance can be destroyed outright rather than waited on. The console draws a pulsing badge for these and polls every 3 seconds while any of your instances is in one, then falls back to every 15 seconds once everything has settled.
While an instance is creating, the console shows the hint Provisioning your machine — usually under 20 seconds. A large image pull takes longer than that, and none of the pull time is charged.
Which transitions are legal
| From | Can move to |
|---|---|
creating | running, error, destroying |
starting | running, error, destroying |
running | stopping, destroying |
stopping | stopped |
stopped | starting, destroying |
destroying | destroyed |
destroyed | nothing — the state is final |
error | destroying |
The normal path is creating → running → stopping → stopped → starting → running. Teardown is always destroying → destroyed.
destroying is reachable from creating and starting on purpose. A deploy that never lands — placement waiting forever because nothing in the fleet matches, or a job the host no longer knows about — would otherwise be an instance you can never delete: the destroy call would refuse, nothing would ever advance it, and the slice would stay held against your organization with the GPU unsellable. You can destroy an instance that is still coming up.
stopping is the exception: it moves only to stopped. Let the shutdown finish, then destroy.
Any request that asks for a transition outside this table is refused with 409 INVALID_STATE and the instance is left alone.