Up and Running With SSH
With this tutorial, I hope to help you better understand how to use SSH and why it can be a great tool for managing your website. On average, only about 10% of our shared hosting users actually use SSH access. We want this number to be higher, because SSH access is extremely powerful for managing your website files and software. FTP can get you pretty far, but if you want real, fast controls for your files, you will want to be familiar with SSH! Additionally, this article will be extremely helpful to a beginner who's trying out one of our extremely cheap Xen VPS plans.
How does one get this wonderful "SSH" enabled?
First, make sure SSH is enabled on your account. This can be done by contacting technical support, or by simply running through the rest of this tutorial, if you see an error message when logging in, then you will need to request SSH access from technical support.
If you have a VPS, you already have SSH access to your server.
SSH access tools are completely free!
There are free SSH access utilities for all operating systems, and most include them by default. There are two major operating systems to be concerned with when it comes to connecting to SSH: Windows and Linux.
If you are using Windows, you will need to download a program called "PuTTY" to be able to access any SSH connection. You can find this program at PuTTY's Website. Just grab "putty.exe" from the Downloads page of this website, and place it on your desktop or wherever you like for easy access. No install is necessary, just click putty.exe and you're ready to enter your connection information.