When purchasing my web hosting service, the service provider asked if I need SSH or not. Since it’s much more expensive to choose a service with SSH than not, I chose the one without. Can you help me understand what SSH is and whether I should buy it or not?
Thanks!
SSH is a Secure Shell which provides users with a secure, encrypted mechanism to log into systems and transfer files. Moreover, it depends upon your requirement whether you would like to have SSH or not.
SSH is a Secure Shell which provides users with a secure, encrypted mechanism to log into systems and transfer files.
That is it!
And it is up to you whther to have it or not,but so far as I know, SSH is mostly free provided.If you need it,just submit a ticket asking for it.The host company will provide the feature.
SSH is needed if you perform server administration tasks or install complex scripts. Otherwise, if you have never used it before, I believe SSH is not needed for you, so save your money 
Thanks everyone - I guess when I am competent enough with this web stuff to understand why I might need it, then I will know whether I do or not, right? In the meantime while I am learning, I will ignore it…
Yes, I believe you can live without SSH if you are not server administrator.
SSH is a Secure Shell which is secure and use encryption. through ssh you can use scp to transfer files intent of ftp - Although you can also use ftp in secure mode but this is not which I want to discuss now. you need SSH if you want to edit your files on the system directly or want to stop and start services which will be run with login user name. at this time I do not think you need ssh access as you can use ftp to transfer files.
If you are newbie.then should take time to know a litter bit about SSH.Webmaster must know about it
The link to the wiki article.
I hope you will find that useful to have reading that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Shell
I have never found any need for SSH. On the rare occasion that it would have been useful I have just set up a cron job scheduled to run the necessary code some time in the next few minutes and then deleted the cron once it had run.
You need SSH if you’re going to login to your server directly. Some people don’t need it, but when you have a bug, boy does it come in handy.
I use sFTP over SSH out of the preference of keeping my traffic secure (at least in terms of people possibly listening into the FTP traffic if I’m on a public Wi-Fi connection) my host had SSH included by default, if your host is quoting you a lot more money for it I would probably move hosts, it’s inexpensive to implement.
It comes handy only if you have root access to server. Otherwise, you will have no rights to edit system files/perform system changes to fix bugs, so you will need to contact hosting provider anyways