SmartFTP Tutorial and Installation How To

This tutorial describes how to use SmartFTP 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 SmartFTP for free from http://smartftp.com.
2. Once you install SmartFTP and have it open all you have to do is fill in your domain name in the 'Address' box, your FTP username (i.e. ftp@yourdomain.com) in the 'Login' box and your FTP password in the password box. Once you have this information filled in just hit enter on your keyboard.

   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 'Address' 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. Just skip down to step 5 to see how to enable passive FTP.

   

3. The next screenshot (below) shows the view when logged-in to your web hosting account. The list of files/folders on the right hand side is the view of your web hosting account and left hand side 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.

   

4. In this next screenshot I've click on the 'html' directory in either the left or right hand view and the contents of the 'html' directory are visible on the right hand side of the FTP window. When you first signup and login to your site via FTP you will see something like what is shown in the screenshot. The files 'index.php' and 'logo.gif' are the default NEXCESS.NET new client index page and these 2 files should be deleted.

   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. If you are behind a firewall and/or router you often need to use passive FTP to get a stable connection. Just open up the connection settings dialog by click on the Tools Menu and then 'Settings'. Once the settings window is open click on the 'Connection' label on the left side of the dialog. You can then check/uncheck 'Use Passive Mode (PASV)' if necessary.

   

6. Often when installing scripts and other web tools you will need to "chmod" or change permissions on a file or directory. It's easy to do from within the FTP session. Just right-click on the file/directory you'd like to change permissions on select "Properties / CHMOD" and you'll receive the dialog below. You can then either type in the permissions you'd like to set using numbers (700 for example) or use the various check boxes to set the permissions. The SmartFTP tutorial is now complete.

   

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