many sites simply don't have a sysadmin

I had a computer science degree and know a lot about many things, but server administration isn't one of them.

My friend's website got to big for shared hosting so he started renting a dedicated server. I learned the bare minimum to get everything working properly, wrote some shell scripts to dump the databases, tar all the files and FTP that to a different server once a week as a backup.

That was two years ago and the site has been running fine without any sort of admin.

I know a web programmer whose company tasked him with setting up a server even though he had no clue what he was doing and his regular duties left him zero time to actually administer the server once it was up and running.

Anyway there are a lot of sites out the are setup my someone lacking the necessary skill and experience and then completely ignored until something breaks.