'instant' setup took four hours

The ticket said "instant provisioning." The invoice said "instant provisioning." My coffee said "you'll be testing this in ten minutes." Four hours later I had a welcome email and a VM that accepted SSH on a HostHatch "starter" plan.

To be fair, this is not a rage thread. I am genuinely curious if others experience this regularly or if I hit a bad queue. The panel showed "provisioning" the entire time with no ETA. I opened a ticket at hour three; they apologized and said "high demand."

Is "instant" now marketing speak for "same day"? The ticket said one user was flagged for mining and their manual review pipeline backed everything up. Absurd. I was not mining. I wanted to run a blog.

• Initial order timestamp: 09:14 UTC
• Service activation email: 13:22 UTC
• Elapsed duration: 4 hours 8 minutes
• TOS reference: §3.2 "Instant activation subject to automated fraud screening"
• HostHatch status page: no incidents declared during window

I have observed similar delays twice with this provider. Both instances correlated with payment method verification queues, not compute scarcity. I requested and received account credit proportional to downtime per §7.1. No further action required. RR

I had the same thing on my "starter" plan last month, no eta either