Remote site management via SSH

Many site owners use FTP access to manage their sites, and are not even aware of the existence and, accordingly, the benefits of the SSH protocol. In this article I will talk about the advantages of the SSH protocol over FTP.

SSH is primarily a secure network protocol that allows you to remotely control the operating system, and transfer almost any other network protocol in an unsecured environment. Thus, using SSH, unlike the simple transport protocol FTP, it is possible not only to securely transfer text, binary and multimedia data over an encrypted channel, but also to work remotely on a computer through a command shell, gaining access to absolutely all hosted commands remote server. For example:

• archiving
• unzipping
• rights change
• editing a text file
• search and filter content in a text file
• and so on

SSH transmits all data in encrypted form, and also supports authentication by public/private pair of encryption keys, which greatly improves the security of the connection, because:

• transmitted data cannot be decrypted without the public key
• the user does not need to enter a password when connecting
• and the password is not stored in a text or weakly encrypted text file of the client, as in FTP

The structure of the SSH protocol allows in GNU/Linux and Unix-like operating systems to mount a remote site hosting directly to the file system in the form of a folder, and work with hosting just like with a regular folder in your usual file manager.

• When transferring files in an unarchived form, some files very often "beat", i.e. are damaged, and whatever happens, the files are archived before sending. But unzipping a file on the server is not an easy task, especially if the hoster did not provide such an opportunity in the administration panel, and if it did, then not for all types of archives.
• When transferring files via SSH, there are no problems of file corruption during transfer, due to the peculiarities of the protocol, as well as unzipping problems performed by means of the OS on which the server is running. And archiving, unzipping and any other file operation is performed simply by commands on a remote console through an SSH client or terminal client for GNU / Linux and Unix OS.
• Also, SSH clients work correctly with the permissions system of GNU/Linux and Unix-like operating systems running host servers, unlike FTP clients, which makes it difficult to remotely access the same data of different users from FTP clients.
• Although SSH is designed to work with GNU / Linux and Unix-like operating systems, with the exception of mounting remote data to the file system, all SSH features are available for MacOS and Windows users.