Completely confused by ftp - can anyone help??

Hi there,

I posted a question here a year or so ago, and was slammed a little for my question, so I got scared off. I'm now back...still trying to figure out the same thing, and I'm hoping someone can help. I produce and host a radio show which gets uploaded to an ftp site for radio stations to download. I would like to have my own ftp site to do this with, so I can do it from my home office. So, what I need is to be able to upload about 200mb per month and have my clients download. Can I do that with Smart ftp? If not...does anyone have any suggestions of how I can do it??? I just don't know what's involved in setting up my own ftp site. The company I host my website with doesn't do this.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!!

FTP comes in two parts - the client and the server. SmartFTP can be seen as the client and is one of a number of programs available that connects to FTP servers. To allow people to FTP download from your machine you will need to provide an FTP server (eg comes with most Linux distros) for people to connect to. This runs on your server waiting for people to connect to it with SmartFTP (or whatever). Whilst it's fairly straightforward to set up an FTP server, it's not generally that easy to make them completely secure (perhaps why your ISP is reluctant to provide one).

HTH
D

Additionally, it is worth mentioning that you will need a static FTP address (or no one will ever be able to find you in the giant electronic universe of the internet), which may or may not come with your broadband connection and definitely won't if you're a dial up user. I recall that there are ways around this, but I have no idea how to accomplish it.

In relation to this, you will have to check with your ISP to see if they will even allow you to run a server on their network (most won't or will require you to upgrade to a significantly more expensive connection which will certainly have a static IP). If you are thinking of trying anyway, most ISPs do ingress filtering on ports 21 (the standard FTP port) along with 80 (HTTP) and a couple others to stop people from running servers. This is a pretty big bandwidth issue for ISPs --especially FTP connections.

Google War FTP and Guild FTP, which are two free FTP servers that I have seen several people (who know more about this than I) recommend. I think both run on windows.

Good luck.