[eitland]

There will be friction, but sftp and port tunneling - which are my most used fwatures besides plain ssh - should be possible?

I mean either you sftp to a shared folder that can be accessed from your regular user as well or you use a staging area with a cron job (or you load/unload the staging area manually.)

[eridius]

If I'm sftp'ing to my server it's because I want to access my files. Not a special shared folder that I then have to separately ssh in, su to the real user, and move into place.

I'm not deploying a website so a staging area isn't applicable. This is just a VPS that I use for various purposes.

[dahfizz]

If your ssh user has the right priveleges, you can read and write your real users files as the ssh user just fine. I do get that this isn't ideal though.