Sunday, May 3, 2009

Good FTP Programs

If you work on or have your own website, you will most likely need to edit files at times. Most hosting providers will allow you to edit your files from within the control panel.

However, at times you may want to upload a website you have created. You might also be uploading a opensource CMS system such as phpNuke,osCommerce,phpBB,etc.
So, you will need to have a FTP program. I personally use Filezilla, which is easy to configure and use.

When you transfer files you need to know what type(s) of files you are transferring. The two types of files to transfer are ASCII and Binary. ASCII are data files such as HTML,php,asp,etc. Binary is used for images.

Today, most FTP programs will also allow you to set the transfer type to automatic which allows the program to transfer the files correctly. This usually work 99.9% of the time, but like all things sometimes a file can get corrupted in transfer.

Some other FTP programsinclude SmartFTP, CoreFTP, and GoFTP.

Some of these FTP programsare free to use, while others will give you a trial download. Filezilla and AceFTP are totally free to use.