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But how could they know what support staff to infiltrate if they hadn't identified the server? The first step was locating the server. The second step was identifying the individuals and getting evidence against them. The undercover operation couldn't happen (except by accident) until step 2.

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It seems you read this as support staff for the underlying webhost. However I get the impression the undercover agent had a role akin to an admin or moderator on other user content generated sites.

If that was the case, they didn't need to know where the server is hosted. And the "private" parts of the back end very likely opened up methods of code execution on the underlying host (eg. editing php templates, etc.)

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