What are online, paid SSH account servers for?

What are online SSH account servers — such as FlySSH — used for? What kind of service do they provide?

Not a single one of them has anything explaining what such a service is for. There’s also nowhere that explains what an “SGDO” server is.

They all seem to explain what SSH is; which I already know as I use it with a VPS and Raspberry Pi. But what are SSH account servers — such as the one I mentioned above — for exactly?

This is a shell server. They have many uses, usually for people who wish to run a process for a period of time without having to keep their own computer on to do so. Many shell servers place limits on the amount of CPU time or network resources that can be used, so they're often only good for simple things such as IRC bots. Some shell servers are free, but their resources are generally more limited than paid ones. I can't comment on this particular service. It seems quite crummy to me.

The age of shell servers is rapidly subsiding. Although they still do have some uses, VPSes have gotten so cheap that they're often superior alternatives to purchasing a shell account. Many tasks that once were only possible on shell servers are now done in a VPS.

This looks dodgy as, and I would stay clear - even if my intent were questionable.

If I look at the services they are offering they all relate to hiding your source IP. This service would likely be used by those wanting to hide their location/IP address.

(There are legitimate uses for SSH servers like bastion hosts, but these would generally be under your control, not that of a third party. Also, jump servers could be legitimately if they had a static IP, but there is no evidence of that here - and again, why would you trust these guys not to man-in-the-middle your account)

Also, I don’t think SGDO is a technical acronym - I expect it us a server reference of some sort. All the services I found with that term are located in Singapore - which likely explains the “SG” part; the “DO” could be anything - maybe "Data Out" or similar? I suspect all the sites selling this service are associated with one provider.

There is us no such thing as an SSH website, although its possible to use code embedded in a website to make an SSH / terminal connection. Also, most SSH servers can be used as SOCKS proxies - which can be used as a web proxy.

I think in the example you provided (FlySSH) that is just a branding name.

Checking their history online, they seem to be VPN providers based on China and have been operating since 2011 and perhaps there is (was?) a clean way to implement a VPN via SSH tunneling that people used back then.

I have utterly no idea what that service truly provides, but as DavidGo states, the website looks quite dodgy. As in, the text seems to be machine translated “Engrish” and the links either don’t work outright — and are just HTML anchor tags — or they trigger Google ads; sign of clickbait site in action.

That said, checking their site in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine shows they have been around on that domain name since about February 2011. And it also shows the site back then was 100% Chinese language.

Knowing how difficult it is to circumvent the “Great Firewall of China” — since many known methods to get around VPNs are blocked; OpenVPN, GRE, IPSec and TLS hacking — my educated guess is that this service used SSH as a way to use SSH tunneling (aka: SSH port forwarding) to get around networking blocks.

Meaning a customer of such a service could establish an SSH tunnel for one or more ports and since SSH traffic was not monitored at the time, they could get around the national Internet block.

Does it still work? Who knows. Many legacy services still exist that technically sign up new customers, but that is not the core business they still have… Which is legacy customers.

And expanding on what DavidGo suggests, as far as “SGDO” goes, could “SGDO” mean “Singapore Digital Office?” If so that could mean something along the lines of Internet connectivity — and possibly server hosting — that is sanctioned by the Singapore government? Meaning pay a premium to get a better connection? Reading this article from June 2020 it seems to me there is a strong effort to jumpstart Internet connectivity in Singapore and perhaps government established connections are being used and are somehow better?

Finally, if you look at the Wayback Machine timeline, it seems like the initial site was crawled in 2011 and then there is a 6-ish year gap where it came back to life in 2017.

My educated guess is that the site existed as a VPN service that catered to the Chinese VPN user market with SSH tunneling as its core service. Then it stopped existing; how it shut down is not something we can assume. Then it suddenly came back to life in 2017 because it’s a decent domain with known traffic, thus a source of some meager income from Google ad placement.