How to log in to your VPS via SSH

Before you can login to your server, you need to ensure the following prerequisites are met:

1. Your account has ssh access.
2. Your IP address has been added to the firewall.
3. You have a SSH client.

If you are looking for information on how log in via SSH with a shared server, please see SSH access for Resellers and Shared Servers. Click here to learn more about Dedicated Server hosting.

In this tutorial, we're going to be using PuTTY to connect to your VPS or dedicated server via SSH. If you don't already have an SSH client, we recommend that you download PuTTY.

If you are trying to directly connect from a Linux or Mac terminal via SSH, please note the format of the command would need to be in this format:

[Bob ~]$ ssh username@example.com -p 22

If you do not specify the full username such as username@example, the server would instead try to login as your local user, in this case Bob@example.com, and because that user doesn't exist on the server you'd get a login error.

Before we open PuTTY, you'll need the following settings:

Host Name:	As your hostname, you can use either your server's ip address, your domain, or your server name (as in vps####.inmotionhosting.com or biz152.inmotionhosting.com)
Username:	Use your cPanel username.
Password:	Use your cPanel password.

How to connect using PuTTY

In this tutorial, I am using IP as the host name, "brad" as the cPanel username, and the ******** as the password.

1. Open Putty.
2. Enter your hostname.
3. Click "Open".
   Can't connect? Getting an error message Network Error: Connection timed out? Be sure toadd your ip address to the firewall.
4. If you get a "PuTTY Security Alert", click yes to continue (If you read the message, this is your server so you should trust it).
5. You will see "Login As". Please enter your username and then hit Enter. 
6. You will then see username@vps####.inmotionhosting.com's password:. Enter your password and hit enter. For security reasons, PuTTY will not show anything when you type your password, this is normal. 
7. When you have successfully logged in, you'll see username@vps####.inmotionhosting.com [~]#.