On first provisioning of some Cloud/Dedicated servers, our customers would have to use their PPK key to be able to SSH into their servers. PPK keys are generated by PuTTYgen and are needed to successfully SSH into a server using the Putty program.

To enable root password authentication instead of using the PPK every single time we SSH into a server, we would need to make some changes to the SSH config file.

Firstly, SSH into the server using the PPK key.

Once logged in, open the sshd_config file and uncomment the parts shown below:
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vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
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# Authentication:

#LoginGraceTime 2m
PermitRootLogin yes
#StrictModes yes
#MaxAuthTries 6
#MaxSessions 10
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# To disable tunneled clear text passwords, change to no here!
#PasswordAuthentication yes
#PermitEmptyPasswords no
PasswordAuthentication yes
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As you can see from the above, PermitRootLogin and PasswordAuthentication have been uncommented.

You can now SSH into the server as root and it will prompt for your password.