I am not the best one to answer this, but i'll comment on what I pretent to know.
1) Arrow Script is what I think a lot of people use.
http://www.arrowscripts.com/
2) I would just use normal code to do this yourself. Don't know how, but Im sure it can be easily done
3) I havn't found many hosts that allow SSH access to their servers. Huge security hole. But they will usually say on their "features" section. And yes, PuTTY is what you would use.
i'll leave better answers to the pro's but I hope this sorta helps