What is actually ready the moment payment clears

Three things arrive together: the address allocation, the control panel login, and the ability to run your own nameservers. There is no staged rollout where the account appears first and the addresses follow. Free SSL is then issued for each domain automatically as you add it, which is the one piece that happens later because it cannot happen before the domain exists.

The three things, in order of what you use first

• The address allocation. The full list you ordered, present and inspectable. This is what you should look at before anything else, because every later decision depends on it.
• The control panel. One login covering every account you will create. Accounts do not exist yet; the panel to create them does.
• Nameserver capability. The infrastructure to run private nameservers per domain. The records themselves are yours to create.

What has to wait, and why

Being precise here saves a support ticket. Some things genuinely cannot be ready at the moment of payment:

• Certificates. A certificate is issued for a name. Until a domain is added to an account and resolves, there is nothing to issue against. Once both are true it happens automatically and renews without you.
• DNS visibility. Records you create are published immediately, but the rest of the internet learns about them at the pace their cache lifetimes allow.
• Registrar changes. Nameserver delegation at the registrar is on the registrar's clock, not ours.

The order of operations that avoids rework

1. Read the address list. Do not assign anything yet.
2. Decide which site goes on which address, and write it down outside the panel.
3. Create the account and bind it to the chosen address.
4. Create private nameservers for the domain and register the glue records at the registrar.
5. Point the domain. Confirm it resolves to the address you intended.
6. Add the domain to the account so the certificate can be issued.

The common mistake is doing step five before steps three and four, then discovering the site is on an address you did not choose and having to wait out a cache lifetime to correct it.

How to tell the account is genuinely complete

Do not treat the welcome message as the confirmation. Check the three things directly: the address count matches what you ordered, the panel opens, and you can create a nameserver record. If the address count is short, the usual cause is a payment that has authorised but not settled rather than anything wrong with the account.

The nameserver and glue-record sequence is covered in Nameservers and DNS, and reviewing the allocation before assigning is in IP Diversity. Certificate handling is described on the SSL page.