DRH Internet Inc. Website hosting technical support library

FTP stands for "file transfer protocol" and it used for transfering files from one computer to another over the Internet. It is how you will upload the files which comprise your webiste to our servers.

FTP is also sometimes used for distribution of files, but this is usually called anonymous FTP. You are not using anonymous FTP because you are providing a username and a password to gain upload access to your webiste. With anonymous FTP, a username and password are not given as it is used for access to public resources (such as download libraries).

How to connect with FTP

To connect to your webiste with FTP, first you need a FTP client. We recomend that you use a GUI based program such as AbsoluteFTP, CuteFTP, or WU-FTP. For more information on obtaining a FTP client, please see the section below on that.

To connect with FTP you need to provide your FTP client with some basic information about your account.

1. Hostname, server, or IP address (these are all names for the same thing) -- Enter the domain name of your website, www.your-domain-name.com, for example.

2. Username -- enter the UNIX username assigned to you.

3. Password -- enter your password.

4. A possible checkbox asking if you want to do an anonymous login -- uncheck this box, you do not want an anonymous login.

5. Account or site -- leave blank. (You may not be asked to provide this info.)

6. Initial directory -- leave blank. (You may not be asked to provide this info.)

Once you enter the proper information into your client program and ask to connect, you should be connected. If you are not, please see the troubleshooting section.

Once connected, you will be shows a listing of your home directory. Below is a screenshot of an example login to a server from AbsoluteFTP. (Note that this screenshot just shows one login, and not the whole AbsoluteFTP application at that time.)

You will notice that the right pane displays the files in the home directory and the left pane displays the directory structure.

From the right pane you can see that the current directory is "home" which is inside of "drhweb" which is inside of "r", which is inside of "d", which is inside of "web" which is in the root directory. The current directory of this session (which is the home directory of the account) is /web/d/r/drhweb/home, which is in our standard form for home directories. Your home directory should look similar.

Note that you can actually browse directories farther up in the tree than your own, but you will not find much useful. It's just worth pointing out that your home directory is inside of a larger tree of directories so that you don't get lost.

Once you are connected, you can ask your FTP client to transfer files and directories from your local machine to your website and vice-versa. This is usually done by dragging the file from one window representing your local hard drive, to another window representing your webspace that you have connected though with FTP. However, you should consult the documentation on your specific FTP client program to understand how to transfer files.

Before you upload your webiste, it is very important that you understand how to upload your files in the proper format. See the next section for information on this.

Transfering files in ASCII and BINARY mode

This section describes an interesting quirk of FTP that is important to understand.

When you upload a file you are transfering it from your local system to a UNIX server. If your local machine is running either Windows or Mackintosh, then your system uses a different method of encoding the end of a line in a text document than the UNIX server.

A UNIX text file in a DOS enviornment is one big long line, and a DOS text file in a UNIX enviornment has an extra character appended to each line. Becuase of this difference in formats, text files must be converted when transfered from one machine to another using FTP.

However, is it very important that files which are not text files, but binary in nature such as image files, not be convereted. They contain binary information that will become corrupted if FTP tries to find the end-of-line encodings and change them.

FTP has two formats for transfering files: ASCII (for text files) and BINARY (for binary files such as images). It is important that each file be transfered in the appropriate format. Most modern GUI FTP client programs will attempt to automatically detect the format of the file by the extension. However, sometimes you have to manually override. See your client specific documentation on how your client software deals with ASCII and BINARY modes.

Just make sure that text files are transfered in ASCII mode and binary files transfered in BINARY mode.

Also, beware of files like word documents. Although the file is mainly storing a text document, the format of of the file produced by word is binary. Any other word processor will produce a binary output file.

Recomended FTP client programs

To FTP files into a site you need a FTP client program. A really crummy program comes with windows that is command line based, but we don't recomend you try to use that. Go for a GUI FTP program -- and get a good one becuase you are going to be using it a lot.

Here are some windows programs:

• AbsoluteFTP - commercial software, $30.00, 30 day free trial
  Fantastic product. Fantastic comany, I've used other products from them which have been outstanding. This is the program I use.

• CuteFTP - commercial software, $40.00, I beleive this has a free trial too
  I used this product a long time ago and many people swear by it. One of the more popular FTP programs.

• Tucows network shareware FTP program listing
  If you want a program that does not cost anything, this list is the place to find one. If you download a program from here and you like it, please let me know so I can directly link to it here.

Unable to login

1. Make sure that your username and password are entered correctly. Remember that they are case sensetive, so "Password" is not the same as "password". You might check your caps-lock key.

2. Make sure that you have entered the correct hostname/ipaddress.

3. Perhaps you are still using the tempdomain.net temporary domain name and it has expired. Use your real domain name.

1. You are probably behind a firewall or a NAT/ip-maq box that is not properly setup for handling FTP. Have your network administrator look into this problem for you.

2. You may be able to sove this by selecting "use passive mode" in the configuration somewhere. Use this possible fix at your own risk.