Hosting: why is it so hard to set up?

Oh boy, what a week.

To begin with, over the last fortnight or so I've been looking at setting up paid hosting for my website. Nothing lavish, just a nice place to park the various different things that I have floating around on a multitude of free hosts.

That's fine, but every so often I get the urge to have something I can call my own. And it's not like hosting is all that expensive.

At least, it wouldn't be if I wasn't in Australia. Seriously: if you live in Australia and want to host something, don't get a .au domain. Or at least don't host here in Australia. It bites.

Just to make things that teensy bit harder, I don't have a credit card. 'Cos you know, I like doing things the hard way.

I finally found a decent-sounding host/registrar who had some snazzy plans at a good price. And it wasn't a reseller either. So I had a chinwag with them, dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's and first thing Monday morning I filled in the on-line application form.

Easy.

Next step is getting the money to them which involved getting a money order from Aust. Post and putting it in an envelope. Since it had to cross the country, I sent it via express delivery.

Easy.

Wednesday afternoon I was able to get in contact with the staff and as expected, they got the letter and processed my order. As expected, I received an email with my confirmation, login codes, etc. Since DNS name propagation takes a day or two I didn't expect to see the website (or at least the temporary holding banner) straight away. However, I did get the direct IP of the server so I could do some settings and such.

Easy.

Now it's Thursday night and I'm expecting the website to start showing up so I can start ftp uploads and such. No website. Have a hunt around, go to their support forum, have a chat with some of the people there and what do I find? The domain hasn't been registered yet!

Or at least it appears to not have been registered yet. A Whois lookup gives a "No Data" result, so it may just not be processed yet or something. I hope.

I'll give them a call tomorrow and see if anyone can enlighten me on just what it all means.

Wish me luck!