SSH Access and WGET on Hostgator

Previously i have said that Hostgator doesn’t allow you to have SSH access for your shared hosting account, but since Hostgator allows you to use Ruby on Rails on your shared hosting account, this policies have been changed completely. Because now you can get SSH access (Jailed SSH), or if you’re also interested on using Ruby on Rails web framework for your website, you can also use it (although i havent tried Ruby on Rails yet, … and to be honest i'm still playing and learning Ruby on Rails right now) and that’s all thanks to Hostgator by allowing the use of SSH access

Beside by using SSH (with WGet) you can also install various script easily without the need to upload each files again using FTP program (well this is really useful for me, because of my slow internet connection)

How to get SSH Access on your shared hosting account ?

It’s real simple, you just have to send a photo id to the Hostgator support team and provide your hosting account information.

For example, i'm sending out my KTP (Kartu Tanda Penduduk, the personal identification card used in Indonesia) information to the Hostgator Support team, and then you just have to wait for them to activate your ssh access

After Hostgator activated your ssh access, you’ll notice that if you try to use WGet you’ll see the permission denied message, that’s because you do not have the necessary priviledges to use WGET by default so in order to get WGET activated for your account, you can tell them to activate WGET too (if it is for me, i sent them 2 email message, the first message to activate my ssh access, and the second email message to activate WGET)

How to fetch / retrieve files from remote server using WGET ?

The easiest way to retrieve wget from remote server is by using this command :

wget http://remoteserver/sample/files.tgz

and to extract it you can simply type this :

tar zxf files.tgz

What about SVN ? can you use it too on Hostgator ?

Yes, you can use svn too. But if it’s for me i only use SVN to fetch the latest files from SVN repositories on remote server.

To fetch it (checkout), you can simply type this command :

svn co http://svn.server.com/files/trunk

And to update it, you can just type this command :

svn update

What about Ruby on Rails ?

You can use it too, but because i'm still learning about this topic, i prefer not to say it here maybe at a later time when i reached the begginer level (currently at novice level now) i could post another topic about this. So if you’re interested on learning about Ruby on rails you might try visiting their official website instead

Well .. that’s all about it :)