SOLVED: How to Use Putty SSH & Create RSA Keys To Run Commands Directly on Your Web Server

At URTech.ca we focus nearly all of our effort on Windows, Microsoft 365 cloud and Android issues, but we recently had a requirement to connect to a web server and run some Linux commands.  The process of connecting and running those commands with Putty was not as straight forward as we had hoped so we documented the process for you.

In simple terms SSH, using a tool like Putty, is just a command line tool that lets you work on other computers.  In this case, we needed to connect from our Windows 11 PC to a Linux webserver at InMotionHosting.com ‘s data center.  Obviously we had no physical access so we could not just walk over to the server and log in.  This is the same process we have used with GoDaddy, BlueHost, HostGator and more:

The solution was to:

1. generate an RSA key inside the InMotionHosting cPanel
2. convert the RSA key to PPK format
3. download and run Putty
4. set the correct port number to SSH in Putty
5. have Putty use the RSA PPK private key file from InMotionHosting

Some people may require an extra step which is to open a firewall port but that will only be the case if you have a Virtual Machine with your hosting company.