When do you need FTP? Here’s my rule of thumb: If your home computer has a broadband connection, you e-mail lots of big files back and forth with associates, and at least once a day you become frustrated by the time it takes, you’re a candidate. The chore took maybe 3 minutes it would have required at least five times that had I relied on e-mail. To test the product, I sent a dozen large digital pictures to a friend’s Web server.
Think of the Ipswitch application as a bridge between your client (PC) and an FTP server, which lets you upload files to your personal Web space. Nearly all Internet providers offer this access as part of their Web hosting services. To use WS_FTP Home or other FTP utilities, you need access to an FTP server. One key bit of info: FTP is for servers, not clients. I appreciated the Getting Started movie, which taught me everything I needed to know in 10 minutes. The download and installation went smoothly. I took Ipswitch up on a 30-day free trial of WS_FTP Home and was impressed. With support and upgrades, a 1-year license costs $60 a barebones license without support costs $35. So Ipswitch came up with WS_FTP Home, an FTP utility that’s less expensive and easier to use. The company recently figured out that its WS_FTP Professional was a bit too heavy-duty for non-technical folks into digital photography, MP3 file-swapping and Web publishing. Ipswitch claims a massive installed base of more than 40 million. The emergence of Windows and the Web made me forget all about FTP until recently, when I checked out a product from Ipswitch aimed at consumers and small businesses that move around a lot of large files. But that required either a greater mastery of Unix, or more helpful co-workers. Upon subscribing to Usenet groups in 1989, I noticed some users wrote casually of “FTPing” files to each other.Ĭurious, I badgered co-workers to show me how to use this mysterious File Transfer Protocol.
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