FTP Commander Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use FTP Commander with your NEXCESS.NET hosting account.

For the sake of this tutorial we'll assume that you own the domain 'johnsmith.com' and your FTP username is 'ftp@johnsmith.com'.

Follow these steps to complete the tutorial:

1. You can obtain FTP Commander for free from http://www.internet-soft.com/ftpcomm.htm.
2. Once you install FTP Commander, open it up. You should now be on the main screen. Your screen should look like this:

   

   Click the 'New Server' button at the top right to add your web hosting account information to the program. The server properties window will popup. This is where you need to enter the information for your server. For this example, we'll enter the following information:

   • Name: My Server
   • FTP Server: ftp.johnsmith.com
   • User ID: ftp@johsmith.com
   • Password: myftppassword
   • If you're behind a firewall, you can check 'Passive Mode' to connect more reliably

   

   Click the 'OK' button to continue. You should now see 'My Server' in list of servers located on the right side.

   

   Double click on 'My Server' to connect. If you are having problems connecting here are some things to check:

   1. If you just obtained your NEXCESS.NET web hosting account then your domain may not be switched over to our service yet and instead of using your domain in the 'Host or URL' box you should use the temporary domain name given to you in your welcome e-mail.
   2. It may be that you are behind a firewall and/or router and need to use passive FTP. Check step 2 to see how to enable passive FTP.

   Once the FTP program makes a connection, your screen should look like this:

   

3. The list of files/folders on the right is the view of your web hosting account. The list of files/folders on the left is the view of your local machine.

   You'll notice a directory named 'html' in your web hosting account. This directory is where all of your website files should be placed in order for them to be seen when you type in http://yourdomain.com.

   

   Another important and often overlooked note is that you must have a file named index.html or index.htm which acts as you homepage. When a person types in http://yourdomain.com our webserver will look for the file named index.html or index.htm (there are a few others as well) first and will load that page. If you double click on the 'html' folder, it will take you to a list of files inside the 'html' folder. Here you will see the index file.

   

4. You will also notice files named 404.html, 403.html etc. These files can be used to setup custom 404 (page not found) error pages. Just edit these files and customize them as you wish.

   

5. Often when installing scripts and other web tools you will need to "chmod" or change permissions on a file or directory. FTP Commander doesn't support CHMOD very easily. If it's a necessity that you CHMOD your files, you might want to look for another FTP program on our tutorials page. The FTP Commander tutorial is now complete.

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