For example all hosting service tells you that they allow you to reboot the server, just send us an email to a special priority address and it will get done. Once in a while you may need to reboot and it goes fine, you send an email and 15 or 20 minutes later you are back up.
Like you, when I first started I used to send emails to restart the server and it took forever. Then one day I did a traceroute and found out that I was going through a reseller for Softlayer. I did some research and a week later I moved everything directly to Softlayer which allowed me to restart my own server when needed; as well as manage a lot of things I used to have to send a support ticket for.
I am no longer at Softlayer, because I no longer host games, but while I was there everything was perfect. However, they don't have servers any where close to under $100