Download Filezilla and start using FTP

After purchasing your own web hosting package, you naturally want to immediately upload your own personal website. This can be quite complicated if you have no experience with it yet. In this manual we will explain to you how you can work with FTP and how the FTP program FileZilla is used for this.

A brief substantive explanation of what FTP is. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and can thus be used to transfer files to and from your hosting.

When you transfer a site with only FTP, you will not automatically include any databases, unfortunately.

Download and install FileZilla

We start by downloading the FTP program FileZilla. With this we will soon connect to our own FTP server and upload files to your own web hosting package. FileZilla is available for every operating system. You can download FileZilla from the following page:

Download now at: https://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=cl...

Once you have downloaded Filezilla, you can install it through the installation wizard. No specific options or configurations are presented here, so that in most cases you can simply go through the wizard.

Connect with FTP

We have installed the FTP program FileZilla. We now open the program and start connecting to FTP. After purchasing your own web hosting package, you received an email with all the details of the package. This contains a hostname/address, a username and a password. You enter this at the top of FileZilla, as you can see in the example below. At port we use port 21. Then click on connect.

If your username and password are correct, you will successfully log in and you will see a screen similar to the example below. This means that you have successfully connected to your own FTP server via FileZilla.

Website/Upload files via FTP

Now that we're connected, let's upload our own website. In this example I will upload the website on the free subdomain which is always included with every web hosting package.

I start by clicking on the domains folder. This always lists all domains that you have added within DirectAdmin. Each domain always has its own website directory so that you can upload your own website per domain name. When I click on the domains folder, I now only see my free domain name.

We are now going to click on the domain name you see here. In it you will see a folder called public_html. The public_html folder is always the folder where you should place your website files if you want them to be accessible via the internet through your domain name. So I now click on the domain name folder and then on the public_html folder. I then see the following as in the example below.

In this example I now click on public_html after which I can upload all my website files here. Now when I surf to my own domain name after uploading, I see my own website and therefore my uploaded website files. So you can select the domain name per domain name in the domains folder, click on the public_html and upload a unique website per domain name here.