FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the way you get your website files transferred from your computer to the web server. You have unlimited access to your web server via FTP 24 hours a day. As such, you can create and maintain your web pages on your computer and upload files to your website at your leisure.
Online services that offer an Internet gateway, such as AOL, might have a built-in FTP interface. If you have a normal Internet account, you will need an FTP program, such as FileZilla, SmartFTP, or Fetch.
We have instructions available for the most popular FTP client software for PC users, Macintosh users, DreamWeaver users, and FrontPage users. For detailed instructions on these different options, please see the appropriate sections below.
If you are using FrontPage, you should be careful when you use regular FTP to upload your files. If you go back and forth between FrontPage and standard FTP (i.e. FileZilla or SmartFTP), it will not work. If you do, you will damage the FrontPage extensions. You need to stick with one form of FTP.
Uploading Your Web Site on a PC
You need to obtain FTP software before you can upload your site. We suggest you use FileZilla or SmartFTP. You can download the latest version of both programs from their websites: Once you have downloaded and installed one of the above FTP programs, we have provided instructions on how to connect to your Web site: |
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Uploading Your Website on a Macintosh
We recommend using Fetch to upload your files with a Macintosh. If you do not have Fetch, see their website at http://fetchsoftworks.com to download a copy.
Uploading Your Website with Dreamweaver
Uploading Your Website with FrontPage
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Properly disconnecting from your FTP server is critical to maintaining the availability of your FTP server. To better understand why it is important you should have a little knowledge of how an FTP server operates. Initially, when you connect to your FTP server, a single FTP process is spawned. This process is spawned to manage the connection but does not manage transferring your data itself. Once you begin to transfer files across the connection additional processes will be spawned to handle the transfer up to the FTP process limit imposed by your hosting provider. As you can see, generally speaking, successful use of an FTP server will use more than one process. Your FTP client does control the number of processes that are spawned and when those processes will die off after the transfer is complete. Now that we have a simplistic description of what is happening we can also establish why proper use of your FTP client is important to maintaining server availability. As you can see there is some responsibility placed on your FTP client to manage the FTP connection and processes. If a disconnection is handled improperly, your FTP client isn't allowed to clean up after itself and can potentially leave FTP processes running on your server indefinitely. This only becomes a problem when you try to establish a connection to your FTP server and the FTP processes left running from improper disconnects are equal to or higher than your FTP process limit. To allow your FTP client to properly close the connection you should find and utilize the disconnect function if your client supports the functionality. You should avoid simply closing the application unless this is the only option that your client supports. |