Why are hosting admins so awful?

One of the new challenges I've faced in expanding my freelance work is that I have to interact with a variety of admin interfaces for different clients' web hosts. And they pretty much all suck. Why is that?

To be fair, web hosts have a tricky line to walk -- in many cases, experienced coders will be the ones interacting with the admin interface, and it is appropriate to use more advanced knowledge and to reduce the number of "walk you by the hand" tools. But at the same time, you may be dealing with staff members at smaller organizations who know next to nothing about web coding and yet are in charge of doing things like setting up email addresses and uploading files. Ideally, this would never really be the case -- but in those situations it does make sense to have a few tools and wizards to help.

So why do these hosting companies build interfaces that confound everyone equally? I just logged into one that instructed me NOT to use FTP to upload files (an incredibly simple procedure that is basically "drag and drop"), and that I was required to use FrontPage for fear of corrupting files. Of course, I'm ignoring this, as there's no logical way I'd be corrupting anything, but it's bizarre that this was set up this way in the first place. I'd figure that if you are in charge of a hosting company, you'd probably be an expert on how that sort of thing works, and I can't imagine any expert would set things up to require a particular software program to function (unless there is some devious co-branding going on here).

The worst case I saw was a company that actually professed to be comprised of usability experts. Not only was their administrative back-end completely unusable, but just finding out how to get help was confusing. They listed different methods of help contact for different "plan" levels, but nowhere (even after logging in) did it tell you what plan you were on.

Hosting companies could take a serious lesson from the variety of new admin interfaces that have popped up -- whether it's Facebook or Blogger or Flickr -- and note how simple and clear those interfaces usually are. One might argue they are not as complex as a full hosting package, but that is no reason to bury tools and functionality in unfamiliar terms or to overcomplicate simple processes. If these interfaces are confounding me, someone who works in the web industry and knows how to code a site, I can't imagine how confusing they must be to those less versed in web technologies.

As a side note, this seems to be a persistent problem I find whenever I am researching new ways to do things. When I am lucky enough to stumble on to a tutorial for a new technique, it invariably turns out to be an overly detailed process for something much simpler than what I was looking for. Conversely, when I actually do find information about the technique I'm looking for, it's frequently presented with the expectation that the reader already has an advanced understanding of the subject at hand, thus offering little value to someone who is actually trying to learn something genuinely new to them.

Much like bad hosting admin interfaces, bad tutorials fail to think about their prospective audience. Either cater your instructions to multiple types of users, or say upfront what the user should already know before reading (and if possible, link them to where they can learn that information if they don't already know it).