A shell account is a personal account that gives a user access to a Unix shell on a remote server, usually accessed through Secure Shell (and historically telnet). A shell account can be used for many different purposes because many different programs can be run on the shell. It might be used to try out another operating system, running IRC clients or bots, compile and run source code and scripts, to host websites, or to use e-mail services. It might be possible to run programs on the server even while not connected, using background jobs or programs such as the GNU screen terminal multiplexer.
A few features of a shell account: