FTP Access to your Commercial Webhosting Account

This is not meant to be an exhaustive manual on FTP. Since our clients use various methods to FTP files to the web server, we will only address those issues that are common to all methods. If you need more assistance than what is provided here, please contact our offices during regular business hours for assistance.

NOTE: If your web site utilzes Front Page extensions, chances are we have you hosted on a special server. You will need to contact our offices directly for assistance.

• Before you begin uploading or downloading files, have your Ripco login name and password handy. Unless other arrangements have been made, this is what you will use to access our FTP server.
• You need to have an internet connection established. This would be either your Ripco dial-up connection or another connection.
• You may perform FTP tasks using software such as CuteFTP or WS_FTP or at the command line. You will need to specify the FTP server name, which is ftp.ripco.com. Special situations may require a different server to be specified here. Contact our offices if you believe this to be the case.
• Once connected through FTP. You will be directed to your home directory. You will then notice a subdirectory called "htdocs." This is where your HTML and other files (except scripts) need to be stored. CGI scripts should be uploaded to your "cgi-bin" directory. You may create subdirectories under "htdocs" (which may also appear as "html").
• NOTE: If you are using the ".htm" file extension for your web site files, please delete the index.html file that is created as a default when your account is set up.
• A good rule of thumb for html files names. Use only lower case characters and avoid special characters, although an _ (underscore) is acceptable. This is to prevent your files from being inaccessible by some site visitors.