Not a programmer at the time, but a system administrator. I won't mention the company. This was 2011-2012 -ish.
We hosted dedicated servers and most of the time, they were mostly Plesk or cPanel servers run by people selling email and or web hosting to hundreds of clients from a single server.
This one time a client joins the network, buys a server from us, and migrates from Rackspace. We wondered why he'd move from Rackspace given they were better than us, and it turns he was kicked off of their network because he basically submitted tens of support tickets daily asking for all kinds of optimisations, improvements, and silly stuff not covered by the support contract. Rackspace had decided he wasn't worth it and booted him.
We ended up with him and boy was he a pain in the backside. Anyway...
Long story short, he cost us more in engineering time than he paid us and this irritated the owner of our business. The owner had my team leader find someone on his team willing to do the following: dump the guy's Plesk database containing all of his customers and make a copy of it on our network. I took on the task and was told it was simply a backup. I was young and didn't really think things through. I feel bad about it now because...
The customer was booted from the network a month later and all of his customers were offered free email and or web hosting for the year, including migrating them over to our network... the owner absolutely annihilated the guy. He contacted all his customers and simply wiped him out.
That same owner is now a highly respected business man and an MBE.
You might be able to do some digging and find out who this company and owner is, if you look hard enough.
One of the HostGator former admins actually doxxed one of my old accounts on reddit by typing my full name in response to some random comment. When I asked him how he knew it, it's because my reddit username was the same as my domain name at the time, and he remembered looking through my server. Whenever the admins would get bored, they'd just dig through peoples' servers and see what they had. He remembered mine because I had a lot of sheet music on it.
They get people like this because they put their admins through the puppy mill process. Basically hire anyone not braindead, train them to do basic shit, and then pay them peanuts. The company men eventually get a high position in the hierarchy for a negligible pay bump and then help keep the new ones in line.
Such a shitty company, but I don't host anything sensitive there and it's been reliable for the last 10 years so I haven't migrated anything yet.
We hosted dedicated servers and most of the time, they were mostly Plesk or cPanel servers run by people selling email and or web hosting to hundreds of clients from a single server.
This one time a client joins the network, buys a server from us, and migrates from Rackspace. We wondered why he'd move from Rackspace given they were better than us, and it turns he was kicked off of their network because he basically submitted tens of support tickets daily asking for all kinds of optimisations, improvements, and silly stuff not covered by the support contract. Rackspace had decided he wasn't worth it and booted him.
We ended up with him and boy was he a pain in the backside. Anyway...
Long story short, he cost us more in engineering time than he paid us and this irritated the owner of our business. The owner had my team leader find someone on his team willing to do the following: dump the guy's Plesk database containing all of his customers and make a copy of it on our network. I took on the task and was told it was simply a backup. I was young and didn't really think things through. I feel bad about it now because...
The customer was booted from the network a month later and all of his customers were offered free email and or web hosting for the year, including migrating them over to our network... the owner absolutely annihilated the guy. He contacted all his customers and simply wiped him out.
That same owner is now a highly respected business man and an MBE.
You might be able to do some digging and find out who this company and owner is, if you look hard enough.