How to use FTP with a Freeware Program

Different websites offer you different ways to upload your files, but none of them give you the control that FTP does. What does FTP stand for? A quick definition of FTP is file transfer protocol, and you use it to transfer files between your computer and

Author: Ian McAllister

What is FTP and why should you want freeware free ftp software? It just stands for File Transfer Protocol, and is the crazy technical term for transferring a file that you have got working on your computer to your host, so that it will appear on your website.

I'll show you where to get your free ftp programs but first there is an alternative.

Using Host's Facilities

Your host may offer special facilities for transferring your files, but I prefer not to use them, because they aren't very helpful when you want to do anything unusual. My video about hosting shows you how to do some of the things with cPanel that I would normally do with FTP.

If you follow my strong recommendation you will choose a host that offers cPanel. There is one case where I prefer cPanel to FTP. If I have blundered and put a hundred files into the wrong directory, the best way with my ftp program would be to delete them all, and resend them to the correct directory.

Using cPanel, I can click the file manager, find the files in the wrong directory, click the box beside each one, then drag them to the right directory. Easy! I just did it for about 50 MBytes of data, that would have taken over an hour to transfer with FTP. It took a few seconds with cPanel.

File Upload or How to FTP

Whether it is for file upload (transfer to my host) or file download (transfer from my host to my computer) I like to use Filezilla for my web hosting ftp

You should learn to use FTP because it gives you full control over your file transfers. You can transfer HTML files just as easily as PHP files, graphic files, and cgi files, for example, and you can set permission levels too, though that isn't something beginners would use.

Filezilla works on almost any operating system - you just download the correct version for your operating system from http://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=client

Here are some of the features that I like. You may not understand the benefits of some of them until you start using the program.

Easy to use. Fairly intuitive clicks.
Supports resume of transfer of large files. You can even upload a file bigger than four Gigabytes, as long as your host allows you enough space.
Drag and drop support
Remote file editing
Keep alive
FTP proxy support

I intend to make a video when I get around to it but it is fairly intuitive to use. Download the program, install it, then set up your user details such as host name (that's confusing, it is really my domain name that I put in there) your user name (the one that your host gave you - if you've forgotten it, check their support) and password (change your password in cPanel for security)

The FTP program will remember these details for as many websites as you set up. I have fourteen sites set up, and I click the little icon just below File in the main menu to choose from the list of my websites.

Once that is set up, you just double-click a site to log in. Then you navigate in the left column to the directory on your computer that you want, then navigate in the right column to the directory that you want at your host, then double-click any file that you want to transfer. You can also highlight multiple files in the left column and drag them to the right column.

Just remember that if you double-click a file in the right column, you won't be opening it. You'll be transferring it to whatever directory is open in the left column.

I'm sure there is plenty of freeware free ftp software out there to choose from, but I'm very pleased with this open source version.

Oh - if you really enjoy technical specifications you could visit http://slacksite.com/other/ftp.html to discover the difference between active and passive FTP.