"A few hours" had turned into almost a full day.
I was trying to open a reseller hosting account called Pipe2 Hosting. The VPS was running, but the reseller account was separate and still had not been created. That mattered because I had clients waiting.
The order started with a phone-verification problem. Then the bank blocked one of the charges because it looked like fraud. I called, cleared it, and told the host to try again. Three days later the account was still not ready.
I kept asking for a real answer.
What about the reseller account? Has this been completed yet? Can you give me an ETA? Please give me an update.
The replies kept saying it would be done soon. One ticket was marked closed while the work I needed was still open. Another message said the account would be created in the next few hours. By the following night, nothing had changed.
This was a small side business, but the clients were real enough that I did not want to keep them waiting. I was running technology for Beatport during the day and setting up another hosting operation outside of it. The scale was completely different. The need to follow through was not.
Reseller hosting was a straightforward idea. Buy capacity from a larger provider, package it for smaller customers, and handle the websites and support. The hard part was that every promise I made depended on another company doing its job too.
The account finally arrived a few days later. The welcome message said it was ready to use. By then I had spent more than a week moving between sales, billing, support, the bank, and my own increasingly blunt replies.
A few hours was not a technical measurement. It was something support said when they wanted the ticket to go quiet.