SSH Or FTP?

When uploading, or in fact doing anything with your hosting account, do you prefer to use FTP or SSH to login to the server?

Are there any benefits of using one method over another, i have to admit, i know absolutely nothing about using SSH but thats pretty much all Gary will use, while i stick with regular FTP.

Regards,

Lee

I use SSH and SFTP (FTP over SSH). In order to use either of these, you need to have SSH enabled on your server.

For FTP, the benefit of using SFTP is that its secure, so packet sniffers can't pick up your FTP userid or password. But SFTP is a bit slower, and the selection of SFTP client software is limited. I use WinSCP, its free!

SSH, on the other hand, opens a console directly on your linux server (like a command prompt on your windows machine). You need to know your text commands and pretty much anything you do via SSH is effective immediately and can affect your whole server, so use it only if you know what you are doing! For ssh, I use Putty, also free.

SHH is way, way more secure. FTP can be brute forced fairly easily, and
most web servers have brute force attacks on their FTP going on a good
portion of the time. SSH, using a key rather than a password, is effectively
impossible to brute force. So for security you would disable FTP, and
set SSH to use keys rather than allowing passwords to be used for SSH.