Unacceptable Behavior From A Service Provider

I'm not going to out the provider before I hear their explanation of it, but I've just had a very unnerving experience with a VPS provider.

Last night my server was experiencing latency issues, but I thought nothing of it until the server went down. I thought the network went down, but it appears that the server went down for emergency maintenance. That's fine, but it would have been nice if they alerted me of it. It went back down an hour later, so I sent my provider an email asking why I could not access my server and if they were aware of the problem.

I receive a response from someone asking for my root password and that they would take a look (he is referring to the latency issue I mentioned, but I was still completely unable to access the server at this poihnt, so I could have cared less about latency -- I just wanted the server up!). I explained the server was still down and asked if he knew anything about it, and this is when he told me about emergency maintenance that had to be done on the server. I also asked if he could ping my server (wondering if it was just a problem on my side), and he responded that he could if he "unpaused the server". He then asked me again to send my root password to diagnose the pinging issue. I think nothing of this email and went to sleep, expecting the issue to be fixed in the morning.

I wake up this morning and my server is still down, but now it's apparent that the host is fine, so I shoot back another email asking why my server has been paused. Fast forward 3 hours, I get a reply with him telling me that I was evasive about giving my password -- I would have gladly given a temporary root password, but I wasn't about to send over my regular password in cleartext over email. This is the part that really bothers me. He then told me that he looked around the files on my server to see if I were hiding anything. I cannot understand how me not giving my root password means I am hiding something. My server was down -- I couldn't change my root password to give to them since they had it paused. If I were abusing bandwidth, I could understand.

All this just because I didn't give him my root password? Am I in the wrong?