Then he could hire a part-time sysadmin, there are plenty of those looking for work. I figure for $200 / month he can switch to a similar powered dedicated server with a competitor and pay a guy for 4 hours worth of real hands on sysadmin time every month. That way he pays roughly the same and comes out ahead in every way.

Managing UNIX systems that have to perform well under load takes quite a bit of knowledge. Sure, everybody can install 'ubuntu', 'redhat', 'gentoo' or whatever flavor is popular this week. But that does not make you a system administrator. I wouldn't trust myself with my customers machines either, simply because to stay up-to-date on all the holes in all the packages that you may have installed and keeping them patched is real work.

I don't think I came down on the app-store guy 'like a ton of bricks', in fact I gave what I thought was pretty sensible advice and offered (after Sam Odio did) to help him out.

But it's essentially the same problem as what is happening here, blame company X because of something that you caused yourself.

The app store guy:

  - quit job before having money in the bank
  - set up overly complicated corporate structure to avoid non-existent liability

This guy:

  - take responsibility for a part of the operation that he's not qualified to do
  - keep on messing for two years without calling in outside help (sure, it will cost)

And both of them point the finger at another party.

So maybe that's why it seems to you that this is a 'lot of this kind of thing'.

As for whether or not it is the hacker mentality is not my thing, I call it as I see it.

I've had people here rip me to bits for making a stupid remark (and rightly so), if you can dish it 'Rackspace is at fault because they don't know how to upgrade a cpu' or 'Apple is at fault because they don't pay me' then you should be able to take it.