[XelNika]

> Trouble is, I had an ancient machine in the flock. It didn't seem like it at the time, but my main serving system was magpie, a RHEL 6 box from 2015.

I can't tell if this part is hyperbole. RHEL 7 isn't a resource hog and a server from 2015 is probably a blazing fast multicore Xeon. The machine itself is almost certainly capable.

> To get away from it, I'd have to migrate to another box. That meant picking out new hardware at the hosting company.

If a hosting company won't allow a customer to install a new OS on their dedicated server, it's a shitty hosting company, particularly when that OS first released the year before they started renting. From the list of things that had to happen, maybe this was about not having downtime, but firstly a single host is not enough for HA and secondly it would be easy to just get a VPS for a month to use as a temporary host while upgrading.

I think you are right that this is a person who insists on doing it the hard way. I wonder if maybe these blog posts are a way for the author to process events and vent frustrations, and not intended for HN readers to dissect, but I would expect her to use her custom diary software for that sort of thing instead.