Usually it's just a matter of hours.

It doesn't take long at all to set up your web hosting account. From the moment you first register for and pay for your hosting account to when your site goes live is often a matter of hours or less. You can have your domain name set up at the same time or you can have a preregistered domain name that you can use for your hosting account. It usually should never take a couple days to set up your web hosting account.