Secure Shell, commonly known as SSH, is a cryptographic network protocol used to execute commands on a remote web server or to exchange information between a website hosting server and a client. Because the information exchanged by the two sides is encoded, a 3rd party simply cannot intercept it, which makes SSH a favorite means of handling an Internet hosting account. The commands which could be executed depend on the type of hosting service. On a shared web server, for instance, the choices are limited since you shall not have root access to the machine, so you can only create/move/delete files, create and unpack archives, export and import databases, and so forth. They're all actions that are carried out inside the shared hosting account and do not need a higher level of access. With a virtual or a dedicated server, you shall be able to install server-side software or to restart the hosting server or just a certain service (web server, database server, etc.). SSH commands are submitted with a command line, but if you don't use a UNIX-like OS, there are a lot of applications for other OSs, you can employ to connect to the remote web server as well.