What is SSH? What's the Advantage of Using it?

As researched, the majority of webmasters, especially newbies, have already heard about the term of SSH, but only a few of them know clearly what it is and what benefits it can bring. In this circumstance, our experienced editors decide to come out a detailed explanation about SSH, giving our readers an in-depth and comprehensive understanding about it.

SSH, standing for Secure Shell, is a network protocol used to ensure a safe and secure data communication and remote command execution between two computers. With it, you can feel risk-free and worry-free to login to a remote computer, to execute commands in other machine, and to move files between two separate machines over the same network.

Due to the high level of security SSH achieves, it is most often used by network administrators to login and control their online business remotely. After all, you cannot guarantee that all the online activities will only be operated on one computer. For instance, if you want to reset the password of your e-commerce site from your home laptop but not the office computer, SSH can give you a secure environment.

Benefits of SSH

Generally, almost all the hosting packages include the feature of SSH. How can it by so important? In the following, we have listed some of the most obvious advantages if SSH.

Hosting Control

For professional webmasters who have a certain degree of SSH knowledge, controlling the hosting accounts directly on the web server can be easily and time-saving. This is because SSH supports remote server control, allowing users to do some managements with ease, such as account configuration, data transfer, application installation, and server rebooting, etc.

Authentication

The authentication is used to figure out user identity, thus filtering out hackers or malicious intruders effectively. Regularly, the SSH implementations include the password authentication and the public key authentication. At present, however, the high flexibility of SSH even allows some new methods to be incorporated into the identification system. To be honest, a strict authentication system can eliminate the possibilities of valuable data loss to the largest extent.

Avoid Attack

By leveraging the power of advanced technologies like RSA public key cryptography, Blowfish, DES, IDEA, and many more, SSH can protect a network from attacks such as IP spoofing, IP source routing, and DNS spoofing effectively. Whenever the hackers are wishing to take over the connection to destroy your efforts put into the site, SSH will disable the connection at once.

How to Enable SSH

After learning the definition and benefits of SSH, you might be wondering how to enable it to create a secure connection for your website. In fact, it is very simple. You only need to make use of your control panel, then things can be done within minutes.

As the cPanel control panel has been widely included in web hosting packages and used by webmasters, we’d like to take cPanel as an example.

In fact, there are only 3 steps required. Firstly, login in to your cPanel and scroll down to the Security section. After clicking the SSH/Shell Access icon, you can generate a new key by filling out the needed information. Lastly, create the DSA/RSA private key by clicking the Private Key link in the Manage Current Keys section.

Best SSH Hosting

Without doubt, SSH is an important tool used to guarantee a high level of security for websites. Therefore, if you are going to find a web hosts to set up a site, you’d better figure out whether it includes this important feature in the hosting package.

If you feel confused how to select the best SSH hosting, we have listed the top 3 options in the following after reviewing more than 150 web hosts in the market. Note that all the recommendations are famous companies offering cost-effective hosting packages with cheap price, rich features, fast page loading speed, no down time, and responsive technical support.