In our previous blog post, we showed you how to create a new FTP account and what your login credentials are. This, while very useful information, goes hand in hand with another reseller tutorial and since Eve was available today, I used her knowledge about the cPanel reseller program to compile this new tutorial – how to upload files with an FTP client or with your browser.
Uploading files via FTP client and your browser
You can upload files via any FTP client, using the FTP login credentials we spoke about last time to connect to the server. We recommend the FileZilla FTP client, for it is one of the most user-friendly software solutions out there. You can download it from here: http://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=client. FileZilla offers distributions for the most popular operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X.
In order to use FileZilla, please follow the instructions below:
- Download and install the software on your local machine
- Open the program and copy/paste the login details: Host, Username, Password and press Connect. Using copy and paste you make sure that there are no typo mistakes.
- The progress bar will list the activity of the software – the actions it’s taking to connect to the server. The last status message that you should get is: “Directory listing successful “. This means that you are connected successfully and are ready to upload files on the server.
- At the left side of the program you see your local computer’s folders and files; at the right side you can see the server’s files and folders. Simply drag and drop the files that you would like to upload from the left to the right side placing them in the corresponding folder. After that just wait for the files to upload. The process can be easily monitored via the progress bar below.
As an alternative to the FTP client, you can upload your files on the server via your browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, etc) still using the FTP protocol. Simply access your IP or domain name through your browser like this:
ftp://209.25.133.51
ftp://domain.com
Then enter your FTP details – username and password and click OK. You will then be able to start downloading or uploading files in your web hosting account.
Uploading/downloading files
We strongly recommend that you upload your site content or any other files to the server in .zip / .tar.gz formats. Uploading compressed files doesn’t clog the FTP server, and it reduces the amount of disk operations required. The user can then extract all the content at once (unzipping files is much faster than uploading them one by one through FTP). This way you can upload a .zip file which contains all the files for your website and extract everything at once.