I totally agree, this needs to be taken care of. And even though I don't know the technical situation of this site, I do know that server upgrades can be done with out causing major outages of several days..... when I used to have a corporate job, I did several of these for a national company and with only minimal outages. It can be done with good planning ahead of time. Think about how many times huge websites like Yahoo, Google and others have had to do this.....
It's funny, just for me to see this post, I had to receive the server busy message several times, but at least it wasn't 10 times or more like it has been lately.