Do I need to be online while the account is being set up

No. Activation runs whether you are at your desk or asleep, and nothing waits for you to acknowledge it. The account is created, the details are emailed, and they are still there whenever you open them.

What runs without you

Provisioning is automated end to end: the account is created, its addresses are allocated, the panel is enabled and the login is sent. None of these steps pause for a human on either side.

That matters mainly if you are ordering across time zones. There is no queue that only moves during office hours, so an order placed at two in the morning is not slower than one placed at two in the afternoon.

What does wait for you

Everything that is a decision rather than a step:

• Pointing domains. Nothing is redirected until you change nameservers or records. Your existing sites keep running exactly as they are.
• Creating sites. The account is empty until you add something to it.
• A migration. If we are moving sites for you, that is scheduled with you rather than triggered by the order.

So an account can sit ready for days without anything happening to your live sites. There is no clock running that forces you to act.

The one thing worth doing promptly

Read the welcome email and store the credentials somewhere durable, then change the password to one from your own manager. Login details sitting in an inbox are the most common way account access ends up somewhere unintended, and it costs two minutes to fix on the first day rather than during an audit later.

If several people will work on the estate, set them up with their own logins rather than sharing yours. Scoping those logins is the subject of giving access without giving the account away.

If something does stall

The usual cause is a payment verification hold rather than anything technical. You will see it in the client area rather than in your inbox, and it clears without the order needing to be placed again.

If an hour passes with no welcome email and nothing showing in the client area, check the spam folder first, then ask us through the contact page. Do not order a second time; a duplicate account is more work to unpick than a delayed one.

Planning around it

Because activation does not need you present, ordering ahead of a launch costs nothing. Many people bring the account up a week before they intend to move anything, use the time to build and test, and point domains only when the sites are ready. What to verify before the domain is repointed is listed in the pre launch checklist.