From Today's maintenance post http://onigiri.cyberstep.com/info/topic/maintenance/18969:
"Today's maintenance will only entail a server reset ... maintenance is expected to last about 3 to 4 hours"
Well, I have worked many years as an IT professional, including as a network administrator.
I only have 1 thing to say: fire your IT staff and get professionals instead; resetting a server does not take much longer than resetting a standard PC, and I mean a cold boot.
I have never seen any server take longer than around 20 minutes for shutdown & restart sequence.
In the worst case there is a severe issue which would prevent restart, but you would know it in advance and plan otherwise.
I suspect that what they are really doing is a full backup before shutdown, instead of using incremental backups; but then they should not say 'only a server reset'.