Good evening all.
I was thinking since all webb hosting services come with a price why not take advantage of looking for one that could provide a shell service. The only problem is that, that would put your site into a risk with ddos attacks and etc. Or some lure to influence people to gain access to my site so they can access the shell.
Anyways i've been told about this and was wondering if it is a really serious matter?
Chris.

alot of hosts do not like to give out shell access due to the fact that if the person really wanted to they could probably crash the server.

If you have shell access, someone could say cd out of thier dir and get MySQL passwords, PHP/CGI script source code and more!
Also its possible to crash a server with shell access.

Really its just secruity reasons like said above. DoS attacks are very comon too because ppl use shells for IRCds and so on. Really its just safeness.

Originally posted by roly
If you have shell access, someone could say cd out of thier dir and get MySQL passwords, PHP/CGI script source code and more!
Also its possible to crash a server with shell access.

Only on poorly misconfigured servers.

Originally posted by roly
If you have shell access, someone could say cd out of thier dir and get MySQL passwords, PHP/CGI script source code and more!
Also its possible to crash a server with shell access.

Only on a server that was never configured right in the first place. Any admin (well, any smart admin) would setup the correct permissions and secure the box. If your host does not use the correct permissions, you could do the above (grab passwords and poke around) without having shell access, a little PHP or perl should do the trick!

We secure the box, but we still like to know who has access. We offer SSH on demand basically, and only standard in the "massive" hosting plan.

Not even a smart admin can lock down a Plesk box, ;)

Shell accounts are just trouble even IF you lock down the box. Things can always be abused when you're local to a machine.