* Also, the landlord owns the place, but that doesn't give the landlord carte blanche to enter the apartment anytime they feel like it.*
Of course not, but the landlord does generally have the right to enter the property if there is an emergency (water is dripping from your unit into the unit below you).
The hosting company here did not just drop in to see if he had any good scripts or pr0n to steal, they did so after resource issues.
The apartment manager wouldn't have the ability to "pause" the apartment and wait for permission from the tenant to enter, though. The situation isn't strictly analogous.
Exactly. In my mind this is the difference. If there is an emergency, the hypothetical apartment manager must physically enter the apartment.
However, in this case, the hosting company has another option available: pause the VM.
It is also easier to do technically than shutdown the VM, edit the filesystem, restart the VM, find the errant process, change the configuration, etc....
It's better the same way that your apartment complex manager turning off the water to your apartment if there's a problem is better than going inside when you explicitly told him not to, checking all your faucets, and going through your underwear drawer, when you're not there.
> Rimuhosting didn't go through this guy's underwear drawer, though.
How do you know? They rooted the system against the explicitly stated wishes of the customer. What makes you think they wouldn't do other sketchy things while they're at it?
Well, I don't want my landlord coming into my house, but if he did anyway because the faucet was causing damage, I wouldn't assume he was also be interested in going through my underwear. Why would you assume that?
I wouldn't -- but then again, my landlord wouldn't have the option of "pausing" my home the way the hosting service has the option of pausing a customer's VPS, so it's more reasonable to expect the landlord to come in since that's the only way to mitigate such damage. If my landlord came in when I specifically asked him not to just to make sure my lights were turned off, though, that'd be another story; at that point, I'd start wondering whether turning off the lights was just a pretext for entry to my home.
What if there were multiple interconnected daemons running? What if shutting down apache stopped the apache process from doing some other job that another process needed? With servers that you don't maintain, you just don't always know how the services interact.
So, it is always better to just pause the entire VM and let the owner deal with it. (Sure, you can offer to help fix it, that's good customer service, but just don't take it upon yourself to do it without approval).
Of course not, but the landlord does generally have the right to enter the property if there is an emergency (water is dripping from your unit into the unit below you).
The hosting company here did not just drop in to see if he had any good scripts or pr0n to steal, they did so after resource issues.