Help and Support: FTP

To get the files you want from your computer to the server you must use FTP or File Transfer Protocol. To keep the general public from accessing these files, the program that you use to do this will require the following information:

Hostname - This will be the address of your site. Like www.yoursitename.com
Username - This was provided to you when your account was started.
Password - Again, this was provided to you in the confirmation email you recieved            upon the activation of your site.
PASV connection - Some FTP programs offer the option to use PASV type connections. This should be selected to provide the best connectivity.

To connect you must use an FTP client program. I recommend one of the following as I've had pretty good luck with them:

AbsoluteFTP - This is a great retail program written by VanDyke Software. It costs about $30 and can be downloaded from their site.

SmartFTP - This is a free FTP client and seems pretty good. It has many of the features that AbsoluteFTP has, and best of all, it's free! Go through the help system to learn how to set things up.

Both of these programs give you a Windows Explorer-like interface that allows you to drag and drop files from your local hard drive to the server.

Secure Transfers - Your server is enabled to received SCP and SFTP connections. Regular FTP sessions are not encrypted and all your data is transferred openly across the internet. If you wish to have this data encrypted while it's en-route to the server, use a program that supports this type of transfer. One that I've used quite a bit is WinSCP:

WinSCP :: Freeware SFTP and SCP client for Windows - as the tagline suggests, it's free, and it works great.

If you have a Macintosh system and wish to know how to connect, let me know and I'll research it for you. If you use Linux or Unix, these programs are installed by default on most systems. Contact us if you have any questions.