Shell access is great because of this one reason

This past month got me working and coding on the go. With no certainty of having stable Internet access, I had to rely on using my phone's broadband access. Broadband access here in Sabah is very spotty outside of the city, and it can be a nightmare when I get cut off in a middle of debugging something in my VPS (virtual private server).

Fortunately, I accidentally found out that using bash instead of a web or client-based sysadmin is actually much faster and efficient on broadband.

You see, if you're in Malaysia and you subscribe to Celcom's Xpax Prepaid, it has a free unlimited basic Internet access as long as your credit hasn't expired. This means that you'll always have access to your emails, Internet text messages, and the likes. The catch is that, because it's really slow (capped at a max 64 kbps), you won't be able to browse the Web or download images; this renders most apps useless, especially if you have to access screenshots or photos sent through your messenger/email or even browse Facebook.

And that's where shell access comes in handy <3
Since everything is in text, data transfer is actually made in bytes, so my command line results and codes loaded up really fast.

Of course, this benefit comes hand-in-hand with lower bandwidth use, and can be especially useful if you have a max cap for Internet access. I can't believe I didn't realise this sooner!