Use FREE FileZilla FTP Client to Update Your Website In Seconds
Posted by Spyros Panagiotopoulos in Website Development Tools
You have been learning lots of things about webmastering, have bought your domain and web host and even have designed your website as you wanted it to be. Now, comes the time where you want to upload your files to your web hosting server so that it would be accessible from the world wide web.
There is a standard way that almost all webmasters upload their website files on their hosting servers and that is through the FTP(File Transfer Protocol). Each computer that hosts websites has an FTP server installed so that the webmasters can connect to it and upload their files.
When you first got your web host account, the company gave you an ftp server domain that you can use to access ftp to upload your files. Most times it’s the same as your website’s domain. Therefore, for my domain website-creation-tips.com, this would also be the name that i would use to access the ftp server. If this is not accessible, you should ask your web host what their ftp server domain is or maybe use their integrated file transfer software like the ones available through CPanel.
However, most tend to dislike having to open up their browsers to update their websites and i tend to be one of them. Therefore, FTP clients software are a great way to do that job from the comfort of your desktop. There is a wide variety of FTP clients that you can use and many of them are free too. FileZilla is one the most well known ones that also runs in a variety of operating systems like windows, linux and Mac OS and is 100% FREE and open source.
From the first time you open FileZilla, you see its simple interface. As you see in the screenshot above, on the left form you can see the files that exist in your computer just as you open them with windows explorer. On the right, you can see the contents of your web server once you connect to it. The process that you need to do in order to update your website is to simply copy the files that exist into your computer to the remote computer, the web hosting server.
To do that, you first need to connect to the web server of course. You can do that from the menu hitting File -> Site Manager and then fill in the information needed to connect as shown above. You need the host, which is the ftp ip or domain i talked about above and a username and password. The latter two have been given to you by your web host and if not, you should definately ask for them.
Once you create your account and connect, you can now easily transfer your files by either adding them to queue or upload them at once. Adding to queue is just adding files to be uploaded at a later time. Once you click upload, all files in queue will be uploaded. To upload files or put them to queue, you need to select them from your file browser on the left, right click and select your action.
It’s important to have an ftp client that you are comfortable with and FileZilla is probably one of the best selection you could make. If you already use another one and are happy with it, there is no reason to start using FileZilla. However, if you are on your way to upload your files to your website, it would be a good idea to do it with this software that is not only free but pretty versatile as well.
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