Section Overview:

In this section you'll learn how to get your web pages uploaded to your hosting account using an FTP program so others can visit your website and buy your products!

Watch The Step By Step Video On Using the 3D-FTP Program

CLICK HERE

To get your web pages uploaded to your hosting account, you need to use an a "file transfer" or FTP program.

I believe the most popular FTP software is FileZilla because it's free. This is the program (Marlon) use. It's no frills but gets the job done. I drag and drop files from one side to the other and I'm done.

Lisa has worked for me for many years. She's a bit of a fan of 3dftp, so we'll giive you a tutorial on it.

ALL FTP programs work basically the same. On one side you have the files on your hard drive and on the other side is the files on your server. You click an error to transfer files, drag and drop or right click and select transfer.

I might add that for Amazon S3 video files, there is the equivalent of an FTP client at http://www.S3browsers.com. But now, let's move on to 3D FTP.

It's called 3D-FTP and you can download it from: http://www.3dftp.com

A FREE trial is available. I make no money from recommending this software to you.

Here's how simple it is to setup

Download, then install the software to your computer.

When the installation's finished you'll see a new icon for the 3D-FTP program on your computer's desktop or in your START>PROGRAM Files menu. Click the icon to open the program.

Here's what the first screen looks like that you'll see:

Click the "CONNECT" button on the top left of the program

Once you've got the program open you need to "setup" a new site so you have to click the "CONNECT" button. That opens up a new window and that's where you set up your first website.

When The New Window Opens, Click "CONNECT" again

When the new window opens up, click the CONNECT button on the right hand side, like this:

That opens up the main screen where all your "accounts" are kept.

Get The "FTP" Information From Your Web Host

When you see the main screen now, there will be existing sites listed in the menu but you can ignore those.

What you need now is the "FTP" information from your host. It'll look like this:

Hostname: ftp.whatever.com
Username: whatever
Password: XXXXXXXX

You take that information and plug that into the software so get ready.

Click the "NEW" Button On the Right To Add Your Site

It's only required that you fill in 4 things when this new window opens so don't worry about 'Prompt for Password on Connect" or "Local Init Dir" and "Remote Init Dir". You can leave those blank.

Just enter the data you have, like you see in the example below:

Then click the OK button.

Now your first FTP account is ready to use.

Let's explore some of the cool things about the 3D-FTP software:

It's easy to use because it works almost exactly like Windows Explorer When you open up the program to upload a file, it looks almost exactly like Windows Explorer, with your files (hard drive) on the left and your server (hosting account) on the right. To get into your server on the right, just click the "WWW" folder or "public_html" folder, like this: Anytime you click on a directory on your server side, it opens that directory.

Let's say you want to upload an image to your server, called "bar.gif". All you do is select the file(s) on the left that you want to upload (these are on your local hard drive so you can navigate with the UP arrow to get to where your website is saved) then click the button that says "UPLOAD", like this: That puts the file onto your server in the directory you specified.

Unlike other FTP programs I've used, 3D-FTP keeps you "auto logged" in so you don't time out after 900 seconds of inactivity! It's frustrating when you're working on your site but keep getting logged out after so many seconds of inactivity, so that's why the "auto reconnect" feature in 3D-FTP is great. It keeps "pinging" your server to keep your connected until you shut the program down.

3D-FTP offers a "Quick Connect" feature, that lets you connect right to a specific directory on your server. Instead of having to FTP to the main "root" directory, you get a list of the most frequently accessed "sub folders" so if you want to go into /www/whatever, it's accessible in 1 click.

It offers a built in "server speed test" that I haven't seen in any other FTP program. If your server is slow to respond, just click "RUN TEST" to check for problems. The software sends some "packets" of information to your server and times how long it takes to get there and checks to see if any data is lost. You can see right away whether your server is good, or a dog. Here's a test run on triplehosting.com: And here's a test on another server that's having a LOT of problems right now: You can see the response below the meter. For the second test it shows you the speed is so bad, they suggest to "forget it". If this continues past 24 hours, we'll change servers. In the past this server tested well though so it appears it's a network issue.