Even though I’m not a big fan of the ‘grid server’ exageration, I do find the Mediatemple hosting to be ok for a $20 a month hosting service. Once I got setup, the first thing that I wanted was ssh access. They provide this and it works well.

Here is what you have to do to setup ssh key access to your account and even use it without a password.

• Go to your account panel under ‘Server Administrator’ and turn on SSH access
• Login to the box using ssh or PuTTY with the account and password given on the account panel
• Create a directory called ‘.ssh’
• Do a ‘chmod 700 .ssh’
• ‘cd .ssh’
• Create a file named authorized_keys.
• Put your PUBLIC ssh key into the ‘authorized_keys’ file. Make sure it is just 1 line.
• ‘chmod 600 authorized_keys’

Now login to your account. If you don’t have a password on your private key or you use Pageant or and SSH-agent, you will just be logged in. I use this all the time to just ’scp’ files to the server.