How to Enable SSH in HostGator?
Secure Shell (SSH) is some time necessary to do some tasks. SSH is a way to create secure connection between your machine and your server. For using SSH, you have to have server running SSH service and you should be allowed to login using SSH.
Hostgator also provides SSH access but it’s disabled by default. You can’t connect your hostgator server using SSH until you get it enabled. In this article, I will show you how to enable SSH and how to use it.
Why SSH is Necessary?
There are many benefits of SSH. Here are just few.
- SSH is more secure. After enabling SSH, you can use SCP to transfer files. A more secure way to transfer files.
- You can instantly modify a part of file. If you need to make small modification, SSH is the fast way.
- You can create some scripts to automate the task. For example, you can set a cronjob which creates an .xml sitemap of your site every day.
There are many other benefits also like changing .htaccess files and all that but that is for too advance users.
Enable SSH in HostGator
Hostgator doesn’t provide a direct way to enable SSH using panel. You’ll have to contact hostgator staff to enable SSH for you.
Just login to live chat and tell them that you want to enable SSH. Provide your last transaction ID and you are done. They will enable SSH for you. You will also get the information about port number. HostGator doesn’t enable SSH for default port. They enabled it for me on 2222 port.
It took me around 2 minutes to get SSH enabled.
How to Use SSH?
If you have Linux system, you can directly login to your hostgator server using SSH command. If you have windows system then you need the PuTTY to login to hostgator server using SSH.
Once you enable SSH session, you will be asked for username and password. Just give your username and password and you will be logged in to the hostgator server.
If you want to use SCP to transfer files, you need WinSCP to do that. You can also enable SCP in some FTP clients. I use Dreamweaver. So I just enabled SCP support in Dreamweaver.
Since the port is not default one, you need to append the port number at the end of domain name. I used domain name as hostgatorcouponandreview.com:2222 in Dreamweaver. Got it?
I hope you will now enable SSH and enjoy the benefits of it.
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