SSH, which is an abbreviation for Secure Shell, is a network protocol that is used to transfer encoded data between a client and a website hosting server, which makes it impossible for unauthorized parties to intercept any data. Many tech-savvy customers opt for SSH mainly because of the higher level of security. The connection is created and the commands are delivered through a command line. The offered options depend on the type of hosting service - on a shared server, in particular, files can be relocated or deleted, databases may be imported and exported, and archives may be set up or unpacked. On a virtual or a dedicated server, the options are a lot more - the web server and the database server may be started/stopped/rebooted, server-side software could be set up and a lot more. These things aren't possible on a shared server, for the reason that full root access is required and all the other customers on that server would be affected. Even though SSH is employed predominantly with UNIX-like OSs, there are SSH clients for other OSs as well - Windows, Mac OS, and so on.
