I am curious to know if SFTP (FTP through SSH) is a feature that a lot of users look for in a web hosting provider?
I have never been a huge fan of SFTP, mainly because it provides a service (FTP) while relying on another system (SSH). And it is not that easy to lock a user into their own home directory with SFTP.
With the latest version of pure-ftpd you can force an FTP session to use TLS/SSL for both the control and data channel. Force may be a stretch, basically the FTP server will reject a connection or an upload/download if the FTP client does not support TLS/SSL on the control or data channel. In this way, the FTP connection is completely secure.
But do users look specifically for SFTP support? Or is any secure FTP, such as the above described FTP over explicit TLS/SSL set up good enough?