How To Transfer Files Using FTP

photo credit: chaosinjune

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. I’ll talk about FTP in the context of blogging. If you’ve started blogging and you need to transfer files between your computer and the computer your blog is hosted on, you’ll be doing that using FTP.

Why Do I Need To Transfer Files?

Good question. 🙂 Let’s say you want to include audio in a blog post. You’ve recorded an important audio using Audacity and you need your readers to hear it. One way to do that is to file transfer it to the computer your blog is running on (your blog hosting account) or somewhere that your readers can play the audio from your blog.

So for our example, we’ll say we’re running WordPress on our own hosting account. We’ve registered a domain name, we’ve signed up for a hosting account and installed WordPress automagically with the Fantastico tool provided by CPanel on our hosting account.

We’ve setup our blog and we’ve started posting articles to our blog. You have your audio file in MP3 format and you need to transfer it up to the hosting account computer. In this example, you’ll need an FTP program to do this.

One FTP program that’s free and has been around for a while is FileZilla. FileZilla is a free program that will make it possible for you to transfer files between your computer and the computer your blog is hosted on. Here is a screen shot of FileZilla.

Click image for larger view (1024 x 768)

To get started transferring your audio file, fill in the Host name, username and password of your host account. The port can typically figure itself out. But for the record, FTP uses port 21. The port is simply a door to open at your blog’s computer. Using the house analogy, there are many ports, or doors at your blog computer, likewise at your house.

There are many ways to get into your house – front door, back door, bedroom window, basement window, etc. The same holds true with a computer but the doors are called ports. Email comes in and out of a port, web browsing comes in and out of a port, etc. Every computer has many ports, or doors that represent different ways to communicate with a computer. That’s a topic for another day though.

For this blog post, we’ll FTP to my blog’s host computer. So for the host, I’ll type in www.thespinningdonut.com and provide the username and password, and click Quickconnect. See the image below. I’ve airbrushed out my username for privacy.

Here’s what FileZilla looks like after logging in to my hosting account and retrieving the folders and files.

Click on image for larger view (800 x 600)

Hopefully you can see that your computer folders and files are represented in FileZilla on the left side and the hosting site folders and files are represented on the right side. At this point all you have to do is drag-n-drop the file over to the right side and the file will upload to the host’s computer. Another way to upload the file would be to right-click on the file and select Upload. The window at the bottom of FileZilla is the status window where you’ll see status messages flying by as your files upload.

Also, if you look at the top of the screenshot, you’ll see an area where message are sent between your computer and your host computer. It will show login messages, connection messages, welcome messages, etc.

That’s it for transferring files between you computer and your blog’s host computer using FileZilla.

Other Uses For FTP

A good practice I use for my WordPress blog is to install the WordPress Backup Plugin so your database gets backed up every day and is automatically emailed to you. But, that doesn’t mean your files are backed up. The backup plugin only backs up your content that is stored in your database.

Your WordPress blog is also made up of a bunch of different files that are on your hosting accounts computer. With FTP and FileZilla, you can backup the who file structure to your local PC if you’d like. It might take some time to do, but a once a month backup doesn’t hurt and won’t make you feel like you could lose everything if the unexpected ever happened.