About FTP

Here are the stages for using standard ftp to load your pages onto the server. You will need you account detail letter to hand to complete this process.

1. Connect to the Internet
2. Open an FTP session
3. Connect to the server
4. Choose the transfer mode
5. Transfer the file
6. Check the pages

Connect to the Internet

Connect to the Internet in your normal way - you must be connected to continue.

Open an FTP session

Just type ftp at the prompt of your terminal screen. Windows users need to do this from the MS-DOS (Command) Prompt, Unix users from a standard terminal. (You may need to click on an FTP icon or open a prompt box to allow you to start typing.)

Connect to the server

You now need to open an FTP connection to the server (this is given on your account details letter under Server Name). Type: open servername

Log in

At the Name: prompt type your username. You will then be prompted for the password.

You should see a welcome message, confirmation that you are logged in . If you see "Access denied" or "Login incorrect" and are returned to ftp> just type:

user username

to try again.

Choose the transfer mode

The HTML files your Web pages are written in, or any other text based files, should be transferred as ASCII text. To choose this transfer mode, type:

asc

Graphics files such as JPEGs and GIFs, should be transferred as Binary or Raw. Similarly ZIP or Stuffit compressed files should be transferred as binary. To choose binary transfer mode, type:

bin

You may also like to see the progress of your file transfers. To get a "#"symbol indicator, type:

hash

Transfer the files

To start uploading your files, you need to make sure you are in the correct local directory if you did not start your FTP from it. This is just the directory on your machine where the files are. To change this local directory, you should type:

lcd dirname

where "dirname" is the directory name. When you are ready to put a file onto the server, type:

put filename

For example, to put the first page (index.shtml) onto your site you would type "put index.shtml". The file should then be copied across, and you should see a message confirming that the transfer is complete. You can also rename a file by supplying a remote filename:

put localfilename remotefilename

This is useful to transfer "index.htm" as "index.shtml",for instance.

To send multiple files you can use the mput command. For example typing

mput *.shtml

would transfer all the .shtml files in the current local directory to the Homepages web server.

Check the pages

You can check that the pages work using your Web Browser: just type in the page's address http://your_domain_name/index.html to view the site.