It seems many people here consider not having shell access a tragedy as far as "i can't backup my database" goes. If i would do hosting, especially shared hosting, i would disable remote shell access or block access to vital files and remove
some of the functionality. And then again - database backups can be done through a simple php script anyway.... passthru? exec? system? As a system admin, i would rather make a nice little script to do everything a shell dump does, rather than giving access to inexperienced users. But that's just me.