Setting Up Your Shared Hosting Account

After you order a hosting plan, your account is provisioned automatically — usually within a few minutes. This guide walks you through the first-time setup.

1. Find your welcome email

Shortly after ordering you receive a welcome email containing:

• The hostname and IP address of your server.
• Your cPanel URL, username, and password.
• FTP and database credentials.
• Default nameservers to point your domain at, if you registered the domain elsewhere.

Save the email — you will refer back to it during setup.

2. Sign in to cPanel

1. Open the cPanel URL from the welcome email.
2. Log in with the username and password provided.
3. Change the password from the Preferences → Password & Security section.

3. Point your domain at the hosting

If you registered your domain at Maxinames, just change the nameservers under My Domains → Nameservers to the ones in the welcome email. If your domain is at another registrar, do the same in their control panel.

DNS changes propagate within minutes to a few hours.

4. Install or upload your site

You have two main options:

• One-click installers — cPanel includes installers for WordPress, Joomla, and other popular platforms under Softaculous Apps Installer.
• Upload existing files — use the cPanel File Manager or any FTP client to upload your site into public_html/.

5. Add SSL

cPanel auto-installs a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate as soon as DNS resolves to your server. If you do not see the padlock after a few hours, open Security → SSL/TLS Status and click Run AutoSSL.

Need help? Contact support with the domain and any error message you are seeing.