What is FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a way of moving files between your computer and a server, and it is how websites were uploaded for about thirty years. You run a piece of software called an FTP client, point it at your server, and drag files across.

Plain FTP is now largely obsolete, because it sends your password across the network in readable text. What replaced it is SFTP, which does the same job over an encrypted connection. If someone tells you to use FTP today, they almost always mean SFTP.

The FTP meaning is literal. In computer terms a protocol is just a set of rules two machines agree on before they start talking, and this one covers transferring files. Your computer runs one half of the conversation and the server runs the other.

What is FTP used for?

Two jobs, mainly.

The first is putting a website onto a server. Your site is a folder of files, and something has to move that folder from your machine to the hosting account. For anything built by hand, or a WordPress theme you are editing directly, a file transfer is still the most direct way to do it.

The second is shifting a lot of files at once. If you are moving a few thousand images, a file transfer client will queue them, retry the ones that fail and tell you which ones did not make it. A browser upload will not do any of that, and will quietly give up somewhere around the point you stop watching.

What it is no longer used for is sharing files with other people. That moved to Dropbox, WeTransfer and similar a long time ago, and the public FTP servers that used to host downloads have mostly closed.

What is FTP software?

FTP software, usually called an FTP client, is the programme you run on your own computer to connect to the server. It shows your local files on one side and the server's files on the other, and you move things between them.

The ones worth having, all free:

• FileZilla. Windows, Mac and Linux. The default choice, and the one most hosting documentation assumes you are using. Take the download from filezilla-project.org rather than a search result, because the name gets used by bundled-installer sites.
• Cyberduck. Mac and Windows, and noticeably nicer to look at. Good if you also connect to S3 or Google Cloud Storage, because it handles those in the same window.
• WinSCP. Windows only. Plainer, and the one to pick if you are also using SSH, since it pairs with PuTTY.

All three speak SFTP as well as FTP, so the choice does not lock you into the insecure version.

How FTP works

FTP uses two connections rather than one, which is why it behaves oddly behind firewalls. The command channel carries the instructions, things like log in, list this directory, send me that file. The data channel carries the file contents themselves.

That second channel gets opened in one of two ways. In active mode the server opens the connection back to you, which routers and firewalls tend to treat as suspicious and block. In passive mode your client opens both connections outward, which is why passive is the default in every modern client and the first setting to check when a connection hangs after logging in successfully.

The protocol is old enough to have a clean answer on its age: Abhay Bhushan published the original specification as RFC 114 in April 1971, which makes it older than TCP/IP itself. It has been revised several times since, but the shape of it has not changed much.

FTP vs SFTP

SFTP stands for SSH File Transfer Protocol. It does the same job as FTP, but the whole session runs inside an encrypted SSH connection, so your password and your files cannot be read off the wire.

There is a third option you will see called FTPS, which is FTP with a layer of TLS added. It works, but it inherits the two-channel design and the firewall problems that come with it. Unless something you cannot change requires FTPS, use SFTP.

Connecting to your hosting over SFTP

Every Snappyhost plan includes SSH and SFTP access, so there is nothing to enable or pay extra for.

You need four things: the hostname, your username, your password or key, and port 22. In cPanel, your username is the account username rather than your email address, and the hostname is your domain or the server name shown in the sidebar. Put those into FileZilla with the protocol set to SFTP, and your site files are in the public_html directory.

Two things that catch people out. If you connect and land somewhere that looks empty, you are probably in the account root rather than public_html, so open that folder. And if the connection is refused on port 22 but the site loads fine in a browser, the block is usually at your end, on an office network that only allows ports 80 and 443 out.

For a one-off edit you do not need any of this. cPanel's File Manager is an online FTP client in everything but name, and for a single file it is faster than setting up desktop software.

Is FTP still used?

The file transfer part, yes, constantly. The FTP protocol specifically, less each year. Browsers dropped support for ftp:// links in 2021, most hosts now disable plain FTP by default, and the security guidance has been to stop using it for well over a decade.

So the honest answer is that FTP has been replaced rather than abandoned. The workflow is the same as it was, the client software is largely the same software, and the only real change is the letter S at the front and an encrypted connection underneath. If you are still connecting to something on port 21, that is the thing worth fixing this week.

If you are moving to us from another host, you do not need to do any of this by hand. Our migration team moves the files, the databases and the mail, and we do not charge for it.