I know this isn't what you asked about, but I have to fully agree with Su' in the comments: if your hosting provider doesn't give you SSH access, you should seriously start looking for a new provider.
It's not so much about the lack of SSH as such, but about the fact that your current provider apparently isn't giving you what's nowadays considered a very basic and standard feature of even cheapest web hosting packages. Such a lack IMO raises serious questions about their general competence and/or level of customer service.
From the provider's viewpoint, setting up SSH access has limited up-front costs (mainly to do with ensuring the security of the service and teaching their staff to admin it) and essentially zero running costs above the usual expenses of running a web hosting service. If they don't want to do it, the only explanations I can think of are that either:
they still live in the last millennium, and think that SSH is some newfangled thing that nobody really uses,
they're afraid of security issues caused by giving their users shell access, and lack the know-how to either provide secure shell access to their users or set up SCP/SFTP access without shell access, or
they do support SSH, but they're trying to nickel-and-dime you by charging extra for it.
In the first two cases, I'd seriously consider what that implies about the company's technical and security competence, particularly since most of the security issues associated with shell access are present anyway if the hosting company allows its customers to use any kind of server side scripting (PHP, CGI, ASP, Rails, etc.) at all.
As for the third case, it's of course a legit pricing strategy, even if it does feel a little bit unethical to me, both because it's basically a way to artifically lower the baseline price by charging extra for basic features they could provide for free at essentially no cost, and also because the feature they're charging extra for is a basic security feature. It's a bit like selling a really cheap car and then charging extra for seat belts.
Ultimately, of course, it's up to you whether you want to stick with your current hosting company and either pay extra for SSH or deal with the lack of it. Still, I'd like to point out that many providers these days do include full SSH access as standard even in low-end hosting packages. My suggestion would be to at least look around and see what choices you have.
