Start to finish, checkout to a working terminal session, this is the fastest path from nothing to a live server.
Minute 1: pick a plan and pay
Choose a VPS plan sized for what you actually need today (see Pick the Right VPS Plan if you are unsure), pick a billing cycle, and pay by card for the fastest provisioning, card and account-balance payments provision within seconds of the invoice clearing.
Minute 2 to 3: provisioning
The server is created, assigned an IP, and imaged with the OS you selected at checkout, this is the part that takes the bulk of the five minutes. The service appears under Services in the dashboard the instant it is ready, along with its IP address and root password.
Minute 4: first SSH login
From a terminal: "ssh root@your-server-ip", accept the host key fingerprint the first time, enter the root password shown in the dashboard. You are now at a live shell on your own server.
Minute 5: the first command that actually matters
Update the system before installing anything else: "apt update && apt upgrade -y" on Ubuntu/Debian, or "dnf upgrade -y" on AlmaLinux/Rocky. Everything you install after this point is going on top of an up-to-date base instead of whatever packages happened to be in the image.
What to do next
Set a password you chose yourself if you have not already, switch to SSH keys, and take a snapshot once the server is in a state you would want to come back to, see First SSH Login and Take and Restore a Snapshot for both.
The checkout-to-shell path is intentionally boring: pay, wait a couple minutes, log in. Nothing about getting a server running should be the hard part.
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