Most of the people don’t understand the connection between the offline world and online world. You may understand the side of your personal computer, and may also have some information about the online world, but do you know how these two are connected. If you want to offer some important or usual content to others, you should have some knowledge of hosting and domain name. If you really want to your stuff to get uploaded onto the world wide web (www) then you would need to understand the concept of FTP.
What FTP means?
FTP stands for” File Transfer Protocol” and it is commonly used to exchange important files. FTP (File Transfer Protocol), can be simply called as the way to exchange important files between your computers and on the Internet. FTP is mostly used when you transfer your Files back and forth for your own personal website or blog. To understand well the term FTP, you will first need to understand the basics of how the world of internet or websites work.
Every website on internet world is hosted by a "server". Servers can refer as place where all the online information is physically stored. When you use internet to browse any website and you download something from that website, you start the transferring of the file from its website server onto your computer’s hard drive. The website just acts like a medium where you go to make this happen. Let’s take another example; emails are very important part of our business and daily work. Have you ever thought where and how all your emails are stored, they are all stored on the website’s server that manages all your emails whether its yahoomail, gmail etc. Also, when you use "Microsoft Outlook", you actually transfer your emails to your database from the website’s server.
Importance of FTP
FTP is extremely important, without FTP your website won’t be of much use. Without it you can’t post pictures, videos or anything else which is important to make your website work as expected by you. Once you become comfortable with FTP then you will be able to transfer large files without worrying about the size limits of your email server. To better understand this; let’s say if you want to send 1gb file to your colleague, then in this case to upload such a big file you can send your file via ftp server. For this you will first need a download link which you can send your colleague. Without FTP, it would be almost impossible to send big file.
So, in order to download something from your or some other website, it has to be first placed on the server. The process for this includes Uploading or transferring the information to the server and then creating web link that will allow others to download the information from the server. Here comes the use of FTP to put the information onto the server. It’s an extension that you add to the internet browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc and then it allows you to transfer files from the website’s server to your computer. Some famous FTP clients are WinSCP (Windows), Transmit (Mac OS X), FireFTP (All Platforms with Firefox), FileZilla (All Platforms) etc.
Being able to use FTP is very simple once you understand it. FTP is such an important tool which will give you huge advantages and will make you understand how the internet works. Besides this, it will allow you to do and get more with less hassle.
