I worked in webhosting for about two years, and can attest to the fact that it's a horrible world. We were pretty good at our jobs, but the company was experiencing some really nasty growing pains, and the product was pretty bad as a result.
One of the big pains in the webhosting world is maintaining legacy systems...we had about 15,000 clients on ancient servers running RHEL4, under a proprietary VPS platform. (And as far as I know, a big chunk of them are still there.) Needless to say, this resulted in a really crappy service for the clients on those servers, and there never seemed to be a big push to get everybody migrated off of them and onto our newer servers running cPanel. We were working towards it, but it was a big endeavor that would leave a lot of clients extremely upset when things invariably went awry. So rather then putting some good development time towards automating the process as much as possible and hiring more support for those accounts that didn't migrate properly, the problem just sat there for years.
I feel your pain for legacy systems. Mine is just one shared hosting server for clients I've had for years - clients whose sites still require PHP 5.2 and break if it's upgraded.
Short of ditching them I haven't figured out what to do. I'd hate to be a shared hosting company where thousands of sites break when the server software is upgraded (not to mention Wordpress installs getting hacked every day...)
We had a non-neglible number or clients still running on PHP 4. =( It's a dilemma indeed, because upgrading all of the servers and software is bound to break a huge portion of the websites, many of which have been loyal clients for years. (But don't have the dev experience to fix things.) Not upgrading things leads to degrading service, and upgrading things leaves a lot of clients with broken websites.
Also: hacked WordPress sites. The bane of my existence. I must've dealt with several hundred of them in my time.
One of the big pains in the webhosting world is maintaining legacy systems...we had about 15,000 clients on ancient servers running RHEL4, under a proprietary VPS platform. (And as far as I know, a big chunk of them are still there.) Needless to say, this resulted in a really crappy service for the clients on those servers, and there never seemed to be a big push to get everybody migrated off of them and onto our newer servers running cPanel. We were working towards it, but it was a big endeavor that would leave a lot of clients extremely upset when things invariably went awry. So rather then putting some good development time towards automating the process as much as possible and hiring more support for those accounts that didn't migrate properly, the problem just sat there for years.