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Once you have found a proper hosting provider and acquired login data for an FTP andMySQL account, you can start uploading. This guide assumes you’re a Firefox user and have FireFTP installed (more about this can be found in the software section of this same guide). However, you’re free to use other software if you like. The basic principle remains the same. To get things started, you should open a Firefox window and click the Tools -> FireFTP option in the Firefox main menu.

The Firefox tools menu displaying the FireFTP option.

Creating an account

Subsequently, a new tab will popup containing several windows. Most users will recognise this as “Some kind of Windows Explorer”. The interface is split into two parts however. The left part lets you navigate your own PC, while the right one lets you navigate your web server space (once a connection has been made of course). To upload or download a file, you will just have to drag and drop it to the right or to the left, but first you will have to create a new FireFTP account. You can do this by clicking on the drop down menu that says: “Create an account“.

FireFTP tab displaying the “Create an account” menu.

After that, an “Account Manager” pops up, allowing you to fill-in the account details you’ve got from your hosting provider (you can read more about this at the end of theprevious page of this guide). The first text-input is labelled “Account Name“. You can fill-in the name of your FTP account here. The name chosen will not effect the connection itself, it is just something to refer to, in case you have created several FireFTP accounts to access different servers. Furthermore, you can provide a hostname, usually your own domain name. When in doubt, you could ask your hosting provider.

Providing account details.

Once you’ve also provided a login name and a password, you can select the second tab of the account manager. This one lets you select some connection and security options. Usually, providers also mention a port number. If not, number 21 should work. Using the drop down menu, you can also select the type of security measure (if necessary). If you have no idea what this means, just select “None“. Finally, you can also select start folders. These are default locations to load when the connection has been established. We will leave this blank for now, as we don’t know yet what kind of directory structure the server has. The final tab, “Advanced“, can usually be neglected.

Providing the account connection details.

Making first contact

In order to store these settings, you should click “Ok“. Your new account will then be selected in the drop down menu to the top left. You can than click “Connect” to initiate aconnection. Depending on your network configuration and your web server speed, this may take some time. You can check the progress of your connection in the bottommostwindow. This window displays the actual communication that is taking place betweenyour PC and the web server. If your connection is unsuccessful, you can use this window to look for possible causes. It might be your server is non-responsive or your password is incorrect.

A successful connection has been established.

Once you have established a successful connection, it’s time to play a little. You should browse your web server and look for something like a “www” folder or a “public_html” folder. Everything listed in these folders, should be available on-line. So, if you use the left part of the interface to open your local documents folder or something similar, you should be able to upload a holiday picture (or something similar), by dragging it to the “public_html” folder. Tip: use the “Browse” button located top centre to navigate on your PC.

By the way, if you prefer to use software like Windows Explorer to browse your PC, you could also select your files there, and drag them from the Windows Explorer window to the “public_html” folder located in the rightmost window of the Firefox FireFTP tab. Now let’s just assume your domain name is www.Jollity.com and you’ve uploaded the file Hooray.jpg. You should be able to view your picture by opening a new tab in your Firefoxbrowser and going to: http://www.Jollity.com/Hooray.jpg. Once succeeded, the result will most certainly be joyful.

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