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What happens after you buy a hosting plan

A step-by-step walkthrough of onboarding, from the moment your payment clears to the moment your site is live.

4 min read · Last updated 2026-07-28

HostLift plans are managed services. When you buy, our team builds and configures the environment for you rather than dropping you into an empty control panel. Here is exactly what happens and when.

Immediately after payment

Paddle, our Merchant of Record, confirms the payment and emails your receipt. At the same moment your order appears in the HostLift dashboard with the status Provisioning, and an onboarding questionnaire is sent to the email address you used at checkout.

  1. Confirm the domain you want the plan attached to, or tell us you need one registered.
  2. Tell us whether you are migrating an existing site, and give us read access if so.
  3. Choose a data-centre region.
  4. Add any team members who should receive access details.

Within one business day

We build the environment, install your chosen stack, issue the SSL certificate and run a health check. You receive an email containing control-panel credentials, SFTP details and, on VPS plans, root access and the server IP.

Migrations

If you are moving an existing website, we copy files, databases, users and mailboxes to a staging copy first. You get a preview link to check everything before we switch DNS, so there is no window where visitors see a broken site.

Migration is included at no extra cost on every hosting plan. Most WordPress and static sites complete the same day; custom application stacks can take up to two business days.

If something is not right

Open a ticket from your dashboard and describe what you expected to see. Every plan is covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if the service is not the right fit you can request a full refund within that window.

Did this not solve it?

Open a ticket with the domain and what you were doing when it broke, and we will pick it up.