With our installations of web control panels such as DirectAdmin, cPanel or Plesk, SSH-access for the 'root'-account is disabled by default. This is due to security precautions (on average more than 80% of all brute force attacks on port 22 use 'root' as a user). If you try to log in via SSH as 'root', you will therefore always get a "Permission denied" output.

So how do I login via SSH on my VPS?

To do so you will need to have or create a regular (SSH) user. This user has to use a package in which SSH Access has to be enabled as displayed in the above image. If that is not yet the case, you can enable it on 'Reseller Level' ('Manage User Packages'). Select the relevant package and check if 'SSH Access' is active. If not, do so and press Save to activate this change.


You can now login as this regular user via SSH. When logged in you can use the command ''su root' to switch to the root user. After that you can perform all desired operations as root.

The alternative is enabling root access in the configuration of your SSH server, but we do not recommend that. If you really want this changed, you can open the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config with your favorite editor and set the option 'PermitRootLogin' on "yes". Save these changes and reboot the SSH server to have these changes take effect.