I don't particularly care if they have access to the internals of my VM; I don't even care if they have the ability to log in to root using a specific ssh key (

I don't particularly care if they have access to the internals of my VM; I don't even care if they have the ability to log in to root using a specific ssh key (or a similar backdoor, so long as it's only accessible from within their network). Those things may be required for the reasons noted by the GoDaddy CSO. I do care if someone uses my password to log in. I'm better than most folks at password security, but there's still too much opportunity provided by letting them have plaintext access to the password (I don't care if it's a decryptable format).