This series of FTP tutorials will walk you through the various FTP options in web hosting account control panel, things like setup additional FTP accounts, monitor and remove FTP sessions, change FTP account password etc. There is a section that briefly elaborates the steps for setting up FTP connections for connecting to a hosting account using several popular FTP clients.

What is FTP?

FTP (File transfer protocol) is a communication standard for transferring files between two computers. For every webmaster, knowing how to use an FTP client to upload download files is essential for day to day website development work. There are some development tools such as Dreamweaver that has an FTP client included in the tool easier for the user to upload and download files to and from the server and local computer. Our Eicra Hosting packages fully support standard FTP upload download.

FTP connect using a web browser

Apart from using a full-featured FTP client such as CuteFTP, FileZilla etc., most web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla etc.) does offer a simple FTP connection. All you need is to enter ftp://yourdomain.com at the URL bar and your web browser will know what to do with it. However, using a web browser for FTP connection is not as convenient as using an FTP client, it is mainly suitable for a quick upload download of one or two small files.

FTP Client Setup

FTP client is important and must have a program for every webmaster, it is used for transferring files between the web server and your computer. FTP client interface is generally user friendly with two separate panels in the same window, one displaying the local computer files and folders and the other panel shows the content of hosting account on connected server, most of the transferring tasks can be done by just using mouse point and click, drag and drop between the two panels.

There are many different FTP programs available on the internet, we have prepared several simple tutorials of setting up FTP connection to hosting account using some of the popular FTP client program available on the internet, CuteFTP, and FileZilla. Feel free to check through the FTP client setup pages and choose an FTP program of your choice.

Issues to note when FTP upload and download

There are some notes to consider when performing FTP upload and download:-

• Be sure to upload your files to the public_html folder in your hosting account, this is the folder web server will look for files to serve when receiving a request of your domain name from the browser
• Be sure you have an index.htm (or other valid file extensions such as HTML, PHP, shtml) in your public_html folder, this is the initial file web server will try to locate in your hosting account when serving requests on your domain.
• If you are entering yourdomain.com or ftp.yourdomain.com as FTP hostname, the domain name must be fully resolved to the hosting account otherwise you will get connection issue. Alternatively, use IP address of your hosting account as FTP hostname.
• When uploading ASCII file, especially perl and cgi scripts, be sure to set the transfer mode to ASCII mode instead of AUTO or BINARY. This can prevent the script from getting corrupted with hidden binary codes after transfer where the web server compiler does not know how to handle and causes error code 500 when the script is called.
• If you are behind a firewall or router, set the FTP connection mode to PASSIVE mode or PASV mode can help getting a more stable connection and prevent frequent connection drop when transferring a large list of files.