In Linux platform it is easy to access an external server securely. As you might be knowing, all popular Linux distributions come with OpenSSH using which you can access remote hosts securely.

If you are a web developer , you may need to install new software in the server for providing new feature. Say for example, if you want your server to support video streaming then you may want to install some video codecs and possibly a video player like VLC. In this case, you surely need to access your server using SSH.

This edition of techblog guides you how to connect to your server using Putty (you may download and install the software from here).

Putty is one of the most popular SSH clients for Microsoft Windows.

First of all, you need to confirm whether you host supports SSH connection. If not, you may have to shift another reliable host which support such types of advance level features. (Nazdrovia Inc is one of the most reliable sites that offers SSH connection to its clients).

Open the PuTTY client in your Windows machine and enter the hostname or the IP address of the website.

In my case, I’ve entered my host name as ‘aasisvinayak.com’. You may change this to your website name. Once this has been provided, you can click on the ‘Open’ button (Please note that the default port ‘22’ will work in most cases as it is default one for SSH connections, just like we use 80 for HTTP connections).

Then, the client will ask you to enter the username. You can enter your username for the system when it asks ‘login as:’ . You have to provide your password as well after this stage.

You may note that right clicking inside the PuTTY window can do various tasks like paste, copy (if you have selected some text inside in the PuTTY window) etc.

If you login is successful, then you will be offered a shell for accessing the server resources!

Now you are successfully connected to the server and you will be able to execute all standard commands.

For example, here I’m using the ls command (since I’m using a Apache/Linux server) for listing the contents of the directory.

You need to note that if you want to install a new software in the server, you need necessary privileges. Normally this is restricted to administrators of the system (server).