Most web hosting providers offer cPanel as the control panel to ease their users to manage the hosting. There are two major reasons why cPanel becomes the most popular web hosting control panel. First, it has an easy-to-use user interface. Second, it offers lots of features that ease your job in managing your hosting. One of the features offered by cPanel is the FTP manager. This feature allows you to create FTP accounts for easier file transfer.
cPanel itself basically already has a file manager feature for the file management need. You can upload your files to the server, or vice versa, using this file manager. However, your files will be transferred using the HTML protocol, which is not designed for file transfer like FTP.
To create a new FTP account in cPanel, click FTP Accounts on the cPanel main dashboard.
Type your preferred username as well as the password on the available fields and click the Create FTP Account button. Before clicking this button, you can set the quota for your user. On the Directory section, you can set it to blank. This will take you to the root directory once successfully logged in to the FTP server. If you prefer to be directed to the different directory after login, say public_html, simply enter the directory path.
Once your account is created, you should see it on the accounts list. Click the Configure FTP Client link to see your username, hostname (server address), and the FTP port.
How to use your FTP account
You need an FTP client app to be able to transfer files from your local computer to the server or vice versa. We have five recommendations.
- WinSCP
- FileZilla
- Core FTP
- SmartFTP
- Free FTP
All of those FTP client apps can be used for free. In this example, we use WinSCP. You can download the binary file of WinSCP (the installer file) on its official website. Once installed, launch the app and you will be asked to create a new session. On the File protocol section, set it to FTP (you don’t need to change this if your file protocol is SFTP with the port 22). Enter your hostname, username as well as the password and click the Login button (or hit enter on keyboard).
If you want, you can also save your session by clicking the Save button. By saving your session, you don’t need to enter your username and hostname every time you want to connect to the FTP server using WinSCP. You just need to enter your password.
WinSCP comes with a dual-pane interface. The left pane for local files and the right pane for remote files (files on the server). To upload files from the local computer to the server, simply drag the files you want to upload from the left pane to the right pane. Conversely, you can drag the files from the right pane to the left pane to download them from the server.
