Substitute your abbreviation for your site and hosting company where I have “gli-sg”, and substitute your comment in double quotes (I use the comment to keep track of which domain name and host the key is for). Here’s the brief version, then I’ll give an explanation of each of the steps. Puttygen gli-sg -C ' SG' -O private -o gli-sg.ppk

Ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C ' SG' -f gli-sg Quick version, if you only need the commands cd ~/.ssh You can also restrict the IP address (or IP range) that can access a key if you are using home internet providers, be prepared for the company to change your IP address without warning, which would make your login fail. You can copy your private key to your other computers (with pretty much any operating system) if you want, although for even better security you use different keys for each device. The generated files are simply text format.

You can ask your hosting company for instructions for their SSH and other file transfer programs.) (I’ll give instructions for installing the keys in FileZilla FTP and in SiteGround hosting. These instructions for making keys are standard Linux commands they should work for almost any flavor of Linux, any FTP program and almost any website host. Most other SFTP programs, and most other website hosting companies, use these same two formats. You need to have one format of SSH key for FileZilla, and one for Terminal to connect to SiteGround. Instead of a hacker needing your password, they need to get both your SSH private key and the SSH key’s password.Īny Linux or macOS computer can generate SSH keys using steps I’ll cover WIndows computers need a similar process.

Using SSH keys is more secure than using a password, with either SFTP (secure FTP, the data is encrypted) or the terminal. You can use SSH keys to connect with Terminal to your hosting account, and also to connect with SFTP programs like FileZilla.

Filezilla ssh and ssl