In this blog post I will be looking at cutting down the memory used by the Secure Shell daemon running on your VPS, by replacing it with a lite-version that does 90% of what OpenSSH can do — Dropbear.

One of the first thing I look for in Un*x/Linux shared hosting is, whether the host provides Secure Shell (SSH) access. As the hosting market becomes more competitive, more and more budget hosts start to provide this feature. However, many, especially ones under big names like GoDaddy and Yahoo, do not offer this essential feature as part of their package.

But what is so essential about SSH?