Suspending the account is really their only option. If your
website hosting has been hacked, and is spewing out spam email, or using excessive bandwidth, the account needs to be taken offline to be looked at. This is simply damage limitation.
It's just unfortunate that while the account is 'suspended' you're unable to access the cpanel/ftp inorder to investigate and rectify the problem yourself. I don't think 1 hour offline is unreasonable - it may take some time for the support team to isolate what has caused the problem.
Another incentive i suppose to keep all those scripts up to date!