Connecting to the VPS through Terminal and why I prefer this over the System Console

Now that you successfully connected to the VPS through the System Console on the Bluehost web admin interface, we will connect through the Terminal program on a Mac.

There are probably many reasons Terminal would be preferred over System Console, but several things possible in Terminal, and not possible in System Console, include:

• The ability to scroll up and down in the Terminal window to see previous actions no longer in view
• The ability to copy and paste text from Terminal to save for later
• The ability to have multiple Terminal windows open, all connected to the VPS (this is helpful for running actions as different users and for troubleshooting)

Connect to the VPS using Terminal

1. Open a Terminal window. On a Mac the program is in Applications>Utilities>Terminal and has the icon:

A Terminal window similar to the following will open:

2. ssh into the VPS account on the server with the following command:

$ ssh username@example.com

3. Enter the password when prompted. (You will not be able to see the characters as you type)

4. If successful, you will probably receive a "Last login" message and your new command line prompt in Terminal will become similar to

username@server.example.com [~]#

If this is what you see, you have successfully connected to the VPS using the command line in Terminal.

From this point forward, I will be running the commands in Terminal instead of the System Console.


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