What is FTP
The Benefits Of Using File Transfer Protocol
What Is FTP?
File Transfer Protocol, also called the FTP, and is a widely used method of transferring web files that includes text files, graphics files, images, audios and videos, etc. across the internet. Without your knowledge, you have always used FTP while browsing the internet.
If you have downloaded some files or softwares to your personal computer or uploaded images or pictures, or zip files, scripts, add-ons, or web pages to an online web service, you were almost likely using the file transfer protocol, or the FTP. These are some of the very common uses for the FTP. In the Internet’s younger days, most of the data that was transferred over the Internet was transferred using the FTP.
You may also have seen that most of the websites you visit while browsing on the Internet using your browser start with HTTP? HTTP is another word for the HyperText Transfer Protocol, which is the way for files to be transmitted across the Internet.
While the HTTP is meant to transfer smaller web files to a personal computer’s screen for display as soon as they are downloaded from the internet to your PC, the FTP is meant to transfer many web files, which also includes transferring very large ones, to be queued as a group of files, and transferred as a “group of files” or “batch of file” and saved on the PC or the website on the web server rather than be displayed.
FTP is, thus, the best way to transfer the web files from your personal computer to a remote web server. The web files are then automatically saved to the web server’s or the personal computer’s hard disk as soon as they are received by PC or the web server.
FTP has a lot other advantages or benefits too, and they include the ability to know whether the transferred web files were properly delivered to the destination.
FTP also has the ability to pause and resume the file transfers. FTP can also give the ability to the website owner to see and edit the file’s various permissions, and the much needed ability to view, delete, and rename the files and even the folders on a remote server easily.
How Do I Use FTP?
By using the softwares that can communicate using the file transfer protocol, you can use such softwares to transfer files using the FTP. There are these three major types FTP software you can use for maintaining your website:
1) Your web browser as FTP software – Do you know that your are actually using your web browser as an FTP-capable program? The modern browsers are capable FTP programs with the related FTP support capabilities built into them.
When you use your web browser to view the files in your remote site (of course, you will need the login and password details to view them), you can then transfer the files from your personal computer by dragging and dropping, or using copy and paste, or using cut and paste to your website.
This method is relatively unknown to most of the web surfers. It is extremely easy this way to upload your files to a web server or a website. Whenever you need to connect to your remote server or website, you can do it quickly br bookmarking the FTP address in your PC.
2) Using the FTP software (or “client”) – You can use one of the many FTP softwares available on the internet, some of the very good as well as free of cost, while others are sharewares – you can test these shareware software which have a free usage for a limited time, and if you are satisfied with the capabilities and ease of use, you can buy it after the free usage time. Then there are high-end professional quality FTP softwares which are extremely powerful FTP softwares.
The two really good softwares among them are them are WS_FTP and CuteFTP. These FTP softwares are very easy to use and if you are an inexperienced webmaster, these softwares can do a lot of good to your confidence by enabling you to do the things the right way.
As these FTP softwares gives you a lot of choices in manipulating or editing the files with the help of some common softwares like the Windows notepad or TextPad, you can easily edit or create many important files for your website with the combination.
3) Page Editing Software – Many web page creation softwares or the web page editing softwares has the in-built capability to download, upload, and manage web files on a remote web server using FTP. Page editing softwares like the Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, GoLive, etc. can easily do these tasks by using the integrated file transferring modules from inside it.
What Is Anonymous FTP?
“Anonymous FTP” is an open FTP account that allows users to upload and download files from the web server if allowed by the web hosting service. Anonymous FTP does not require the user to have their own user-name and password to use the FTP. Usually, the user-name will be just “anonymous” and the password can be a valid e-mail address.
This kind of FTP account is usually used by web archives which need to accept web files submitted by the website’s visitors. This is also a very easy method to get your website’s users to upload large files rather than using the e-main attachments to send them.
You will also find that such anonymous FTP accounts are mainly used by the websites and people to download and upload pirated softwares.
So, this is a security concern that is openly disregarded for sending and receiving illegal files and softwares, or passing on adult material. Still, for a better purpose like uploading large image and multimedia files that are not piracy in any way, this FTP feature can be a really useful for many such purposes.
What are multiple FTP accounts?
Some hosting plans will allow you to add more FTP “accounts” or “users” on your website. Each FTP account will have its own unique user-name and password. Each FTP account can also have its own web folder on the web server that can only be accessed by that particular user depending upon the access levels set to it.
As said earlier, the FTP has been on the internet for a long time now, and has an importance of its own. Most of the webmasters, especially the novices, would not have got ahead if they were unable to use such FTP programs to transfer their files to their websites.
