excellent story
It's always nice to see an honest worker's integrity lead to a happy ending.
The problem you mention with hosting companies hijacking domain names sounds familiar, and the fact this kind of thing goes on is the reason I have adopted a policy of not only choosing my domain registrars very carefully (I use pairNIC, and advise everyone who'll listen to avoid GoDaddy, for instance), but also ensuring that my domain registrar and my webhost are not the same company. Putting both those eggs in the same basket is a great way to get screwed.
It's worth remembering that even if a particular company treats you well now, companies change, and a brand you trusted yesterday may screw you over tomorrow. I wrote an article about that for TR some years back, with a title like "There's No Such Thing As A Trusted Brand" regarding that very subject, but linking to other articles from comments here has a tendency to make comments vanish, so I'll leave finding that as an exercise for the reader. If you do go looking for it, keep in mind that TR has changed its CSS in some backwards-incompatible ways over the years, and some of the article text formatting might be screwed up too.
