Your first hour with a new hosting account

March 3, 2026 · 3 min read · Markdown

You've signed up, the welcome email has arrived, and now you're staring at a blank hosting account. This guide covers the four things worth doing in your first hour: logging in, pointing your domain, creating an email address, and getting a site up. You'll need your welcome email handy; it contains your cPanel login details and your nameservers.

Log in to cPanel

Use the cPanel link from your welcome email, or sign in through the client area and open cPanel from there. Once you're in, take thirty seconds to look around. Everything in this guide lives in three sections: Email, Domains, and Files (plus Softaculous for WordPress).

If your welcome email included a temporary password, change it now, before you forget.

Point your domain at the hosting

Your site and email won't work until your domain knows where to find the server. At your domain registrar (wherever you bought the domain), replace the existing nameservers with the two nameservers listed in your welcome email.

This change is not instant. It usually takes effect within a few hours, but it can take up to a day or two for every network worldwide to catch up. Don't panic if the site works on your phone but not your laptop for a while; that's normal.

If your domain currently runs live email or services elsewhere that you can't interrupt, hold off and read up on using A records instead of nameservers before switching anything.

Create your first email address

While DNS is propagating, set up email so it's ready when the domain flips over.

1. In cPanel, open Email Accounts and click Create.
2. Enter the address you want (info@, hello@, your name) and a strong password.
3. Give the mailbox a sensible storage limit and click Create.

You can read this mailbox in webmail right away via Check Email, and add it to your phone or desktop mail app whenever you like.

Get a site online

You have two routes, depending on what you're building.

Installing WordPress: open Softaculous Apps Installer in cPanel, choose WordPress, click Install, fill in the site name and an admin username and password, and let it run. A minute later you have a working site.

Uploading an existing site: open File Manager, go into the public_html folder, and upload your files there. If you have everything zipped, upload the zip and use File Manager's Extract button; it's far faster than uploading files one by one. The homepage file should be named index.html or index.php and sit directly in public_html.

Either way, once DNS has propagated, visit your domain and confirm the site loads. Then check SSL/TLS Status in cPanel and make sure your domain shows a valid certificate so the site loads over https.

If it didn't work

• The domain still shows the old site or a parking page. DNS hasn't propagated yet, or the nameservers weren't saved correctly at the registrar. Double-check the spelling of both nameservers.
• You see a directory listing or a default page instead of your site. Your files are probably in the wrong folder. They belong inside public_html, not in a subfolder of it and not in your home directory.
• Email won't receive. It usually starts working once the nameserver change finishes propagating. Give it a few hours before troubleshooting further.

Anything else, we're at /support and happy to help you get launched.

Stuck partway through? Support is answered by the engineers who run the servers, around the clock.

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