Using FTP

What is FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is the method that is used to transfer files from your computer to your web-space. If you can imagine that web-space is like an extra drive on your computer, then FTP is the equivalent of saving a file on your hard-disk, but instead you save it on your web-space

FTP was first invented in the UNIX world in order to move files from one computer to another. It consists of two pieces of software. One to send the information from a computer and another one to receive the information. It is now widely used to transfer files from a computer to web-space using an internet connection

Although it is not so necessary to understand at this point exactly how it does work, uploading a file can be understood as doing the exact opposite of downloading a file from the internet. So instead of downloading a file from the internet to your computer, your are uploading a file from your computer to the internet

What is an FTP Client?

Although in theory you can upload a file to the internet without any special software, an FTP client will make the job much easier. This special software is called an FTP Client. There are different FTP Clients available which can be found by clicking on this software download site , but one of the most secure and easiest to use of the free clients available is called WS-FTP LE

How do you use an FTP client

The majority of FTP Clients are fairly similar in that they have two sides to the screen. One shows your hard-disk with a list of the files that are on there and the other side shows your web-space with the files that are on there. In order to upload your files from your hard-disk to your web-space, all that you have to do, is to drag the files over from one side to the other

How do you log in to Web-Hosting space?

When you sign up for web-space you should receive the information necessary in order to log in to your account using WS-FTP LE. It will look something like the following:

FTP Information

Domain Name: example1.port5.com
FTP Server: ftp.portland.co.uk
User ID: example
Password: ******

Domain Name

This is the website address that you can type into the browser in order to access your site. If you type it in without anything being uploaded to your site, then you will get an error. If you were to put a file there called helloworld.html , then you would type into the browser http://example1.port5.com/helloworld.html in order to look at that page

FTP Server

This is the name or the address to which you are uploading your pages. It is equivalent to describing which drive you are saving information to if you were to be saving onto your computer

User ID

This is your own personal user id that no-one else who has a site with your web-hoster will have. You may want to think of it as your member name. Note that your User ID and the first part of your domain name perhaps may not be exactly the same

Password

This is your personal password which you will need in order to gain access to your website using FTP

This is all of the information that you will need in order to upload files to your Webspace

How do I actually connect to my web-space?

Taking the example information given above, let's see how it fits into the WS-FTP LE client:

What you can see above, is a screen-shot of a filled in version of what will appear on your screen when you first open up WS-FTP LE. Although it may look complicated, in fact all you need to do is fill in the information as shown

The profile name can be anything that you choose, as all that this is for, is to help you remember to which account the other information applies. If you have lots of sites, it helps to name it in order to differentiate between them

The Host Name/Address is what we called above 'FTP Server'

There is no need to change anything in Host Type as WS_FTP LE will automatically detect it. After the first instance of use, it will generally change to UNIX

Your User ID and password are exactly as might be expected. Make sure that you type them in the correct case

You can now click OK and it should connect to your web-space. You can look in the text box underneath where it gives a commentary of what is going on and see if there are any errors and what they are.

Alright. I am now connected, but how do I actually transfer files from my computer to my web-space?

This is probably the easiest part of all. As mentioned earlier, all that you do is to point, drag and drop and WS_FTP LE does the rest for you. You may drag individual files by clicking on them and dragging them. You may move multiple files by clicking on the first and then keeping down the control key while clicking on the subsequent files. You may even move a directory or multiple directories in the same way.