Failed to upgrade hosted wordpress and other misfortunes.

Greetings!

First i’d like to state that, i’m absolutely new and noob to the wordpress. I’ve just met with this whole system, while I’m trying to transfer from e107 to WP.

A friend of mine has asked me to take care of his site while he has other businesses. I’ve noticed, that the site is really fallen behind on updates (core, theme, plugins and everything). So I naively clicked, then it said, the automatic update process failed, and can’t update the system.

This would be the first problem. And the second, and even stranger, that a plugin somehow lost from the list, and I can’t reinstall.

Sadly we do not have a FTP connection to the hosting plan, so I can’t update manually, and check if everything is okay on the server. The provider’s (maybe 1and1) website is mostly useless.

I had some experience in messing with websites, but with totally different systems. (Tho I’m still amateur)

If you need any details, please ask, I don’t know what might be important in WP.

Sorry for any grammar errors, english is not my native language.