My OS is Ubuntu 10.10.
I have several small sites (all on various shared hosts) and I'm thinking that it'd be probably good idea to regularly backup mysql databases from these remote shared hosts. I currently do it manually and it seem to be while not laborious but definitely boring process (phpmyadmin).

How should I go about it (no ssh access available)?

If do it like this: 

```
mysqldump -u root -p[root_password] [database_name] -h mysql_host > dumpfilename.sql

```

Does that mean that password is being transferred in plain text?