FileZilla – Excellent Open Source FTP/SFTP Client

People often ask our support representatives what the best solution is for uploading files to their website. Over the years the staff at Weberz have tried various FTP clients with varying levels of success. After discovering FileZilla we quickly rolled it out to all of our staff members.

FileZilla is an open source and is platform independent so it’s available on Windows, OS X and Linux. You can find it at filezilla-project.org. It supports both the FTP and SFTP protocols. The team behind FileZilla is also very active so updates and bugfixes are delivered on a regular basis.

Site Manager

One of my favorite features of FileZilla is the Site Manager that allows you to save your most commonly used connections for quick and easy access. Utilizing the site manager makes it easier when you have multiple logins and sites to keep track of.

A fair number of Weberz customers have multiple domains setup under one user account. You can utilize some of the advanced settings in Site Manager and set a default remote directory for the domain.

For example, with the weberz.com account I have my FileZilla set to automatically set the default local directory to /weberz.com. Thus every time I login to make modifications or transfer files to the server I’m automatically placed in the correct directory.

You could set the default remote directory for each domain you have hosted in your Weberz account within the site manager for quick and easy access to your files.

SFTP

Security should never be an afterthought. Our team at Weberz have implemented various policies and procedures to help keep our servers safe, secure and online. We recommend our customers do the same. SFTP is a protocol that carries the FTP traffic across an encrypted connection using an industry standard protocol called SSH. Using SFTP is an easy step our customer can take to help protect the identity of their accounts.

All of the Linux servers at Weberz are configured to allow SFTP access to our end users. Currently our control panel does not support SFTP with our Windows servers. The only requirement to use SFTP is shell access to your account. You can request shell access from within the control panel. Once shell access has been granted you can use SFTP to securely transfer your files to your Weberz hosting account.

FileZilla is an excellent and lightweight opensource piece of software that packs a powerful punch. We’ve made it part of our standard workstation configuration at Weberz. Will you?