FAQ
1. How do I access my FTP site?
To access an FTP site, you need a special piece of software known as an FTP client. There are probably hundreds of FTP clients out there, ranging in price from free to very expensive, and in features from bare-boned to highly automated.
In fact, the web browser that you are using right now has a built-in FTP client. When you use it to access your FTP site, what you see looks similar to when you use Windows Explorer to view files on your own computer. But a web browser does not have a lot of FTP client features, so you may want to go with something built especially for FTP.
Our current favorite free FTP client is Core FTP Lite, which is available for download from www.coreftp.com.
Any real FTP client will have a place to input at least 3 pieces of connection information: the site address (ftp.simpleftp.net), your username, and your password. Look in the help files under 'login' or 'connection' for where to put that connection information in your FTP client.
2. When I type in the site address in Internet Explorer, it takes me to your web page. How do I get to my FTP site?
Web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, are designed for looking at web sites (which are HTTP), not FTP sites. Web browsers do their web browsing job very well, but they also assume you are wanting to view a web page unless you tell them differently.
If you type simpleftp.net into the address bar of your web browser, it assumes you mean http://simpleftp.net, which is the address of our web page. To look at an FTP site, you need to type in ftp://ftp.simpleftp.net, which will tell your browser to look at the FTP site at ftp.simpleftp.net.
3. When I type ftp://ftp.simpleftp.net into my web browser, I get an error message. Why can't I get into my FTP site?
Some FTP servers allow what are called anonymous logins, which means that anyone who types in the address of that site can log into the site without a username and password. This is fine if you don't care who has access to your files. That is not the case with your SimpleFTP site, however. You do care who has access to your files.
For this reason, we have disabled anonymous logins on all SimpleFTP sites. So when you type in ftp://ftp.simpleftp.net, your web browser tries to do an anonymous login to simpleftp.net, which is not allowed. That is why you get that message.
To access your files, you need to login with your username and password, which you can do two ways.
First, if you've already typed ftp://ftp.simpleftp.net into your web browser and received the error message about anonymous logins
- Click OK or Cancel on the error message to close it
- Click on the File menu and choose Login As. . .
- A little box labeled Login As will appear. Type in your username into the box labeled User Name and type your password into the box labeled Password. Pay very close attention to capitalization.
- Click the button labeled Login.
If something goes wrong, you may need to close your web browser and open up a new one to try again.
The second way to login to an ftp site with a web browser is actually much easier. Just type in the username and password into the address bar along with the site address. It will look like this: ftp://[username]:[password]@ftp.simpleftp.net, where [username] is your username and [password] is your password.
So for example, our demo site has the username demo and the password demo. You can log into our demo site by typing in ftp://demo:demo@ftp.simpleftp.net. Remember the colon (:) between the username and password, and the @ symbol between the password and the site address.