You can either have a shell account or not, depending simply on whether or not you need it. If you don't know what a shell account is, and/or are just using web & mail then you don't need one. Fewer shells means the machine is more secure which ultimately benefits everyone.

If you do have a genuine need then that's fine, go for it.

Shell users

A typical setting up session may go something like this:

• Decide on a username, e.g. paulm
• I decide on a password and tell you, in code like a mutual friend's age (a "shared secret")
• You log in with SSH and change that password ASAP. What's SSH?
• You decide how you're going to lay your sites out in your home directory. For example, you might make a couple of directories mkdir -p html/paulm.com html/realprogrammers.com.
• You tell me what you decided, and then I give you another account, typically that starts with "www" which you can use to FTP to those sites. Why do this?
• You log in via the main shell account with the same shared secret password and change that www account's password (e.g. passwd wwwpm) to something else, not the shell's password.
• I also set the webserver to those directories for those domain names plus any other setting up like PHP or whatever.