There is a big difference in planning server layouts and similar tasks and writing pseudocode. In comparason the planning is much cheaper and the cost of getting things wrong can be quite high. But with pseudocode, it is not that much cheaper to write than real code is, it gives you a lot less useful information and the cost of a mistake is quite cheap in code (that is while you are still developing things and for the types of problems pseudocode might even be able to catch).