Do you think this is more or less wrong than simply halting the instance?
If they had reason to believe his instance was impacting other users or their network, then halting the instance (preferably after contacting him about the problem, which seems to have happened) would not have been wrong at all. So, logging in after he'd asked them not to is definitely the "more wrong" of the two options. I tend to think it was an honest mistake made by a support tech who was having a bad/busy day rather than an attempt to violate any (real or imagined) privacy pact that the company had made with Aaron.
As I've mentioned a few times here, the default expectation of hosting customers is that the host will login to find and fix problems. From the perspective of most hosting customers, that is part of the service they are paying for (and they pay more to get more of it, as in the case of RackSpace), and if it were missing they would be angry and leave. My guess is that the tech at Rimu simply didn't remember or notice that Aaron had requested no one ever login to his box.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that, as someone that is deeply familiar with this industry, when I read the shitstorm that has been kicked up here over this (extremely minor) incident, I'm just stunned and baffled. This is seriously a tempest in a teapot, if ever I saw one.
Yes, your hosting provider should respect your privacy, to the best of their ability to do so while shepherding their shared resources responsibly to provide the best service to each of their customers. But, there is no accusation of theft of data; no reason to believe Rimuhosting acted inappropriately with the access they had; no reason to think it was done maliciously or completely without warning (Aaron admits he'd talked with them in the past about the issue); and no reason to think Rimuhosting was trying to piss anyone off.
Not being thoroughly informed about a customer's wishes is pretty much all one can accuse them of here.
The thing is, that's just Aaron that thinks that. I'm sure other customers would be delighted for tech support to access their boxes to fix problems, indeed annoyed if they didn't.
Aaron pays $20 for a cheap-ass VPS, uses too much CPU, and they go out of their way to fix the specific problem instead of just nuking his account, and he complains on some BS privacy grounds. You just can't please some people.
Criminy. Did you even read what you quoted before you responded to it?
What is at issue is whether the tech should have stopped the instance, or logged in and located and stopped the offending service. The privacy nuts among us (I'm one of them, but with a healthy dose of "hosting industry reality" thrown in for good measure) are crying foul that anyone should ever be able to login to "your" server under any circumstances. The other side of the coin is that a large percentage of hosting customers have no idea what they're doing, and rely on the host to occasionally step in and set things right.
Hosting providers tend to default to stepping in, because that's what the majority of hosting customers want and expect. Rackspace has built a ~$1 billion business on this premise. "Managed hosting" is more expensive because you get this kind of intervention (hopefully in a more positive direction most of the time) on a regular basis.
The only wrong, I think, in this case is that the tech at Rimuhosting did not respect Aaron's specific wish to not allow him to access his box. And, since I know Rimuhosting has a good reputation that spans a decade or so, I must assume it was a mistake made in good faith. It is entirely possible the tech didn't reread the full conversation about the problem, and missed the bit about "over my dead body", and just assumed Aaron would want to keep email spinning while he figured out why his website was causing problems.
To turn this into a huge political struggle is pointless, and casts aspersions on a company that is by most accounts, one of the really good ones in their industry.