FTP is the protocol that every single web hosting server out there uses to enable its subscribers and users upload and download content between their servers. The servers are simply computers like the one you have at home, but substantially more powerful and with a lot more hard disk space. The reason they have so much disk space if because there may well be hundreds of users' websites stored on that one machine, each one of those has the ability to connect to the server and transfer files using an FTP client. When ever you connect to your web host to do work on your website you are using FTP, a few people may be using SFTP but probably won't be aware of it. Either way, you will be using a form of FTP!

FTP clients are simply programs that allow you to use all the commands available to the FTP protocol, such as upload, download, move, rename and many more. It is of course possible to do all this manually without the use of a GUI (Graphical User Interface), which is what commercial FTP clients provide you with like buttons and menus. Manual methods often involve a command line interface where the user types the FTP commands directly, telling the server exactly what to do. For most people, this would take to long to learn and would most likely not be worth learning if they just want to do the odd file upload or download! Graphical based FTP clients take away all those complexities giving you simple buttons to click on that execute the complicated commands for you. A new generation of FTP convenience has dawned upon us and that comes in the form of web based FTP clients. These are simply online interfaces or small programs that let you access your ftp/web server from a website. If you are going to use this kind of service make sure the website hosting the web based FTP client is trustworthy, as you have to enter in your login credentials to gain access to your FTP space. If it is a malicious website, it is very easy for them to steal that information from you!

Public FTP servers let you log into them with no user credentials what so ever and you are considered an anonymous user. Paid web hosting and ftp hosting services do not allow anonymous logins, as they are obviously a serious breach of security! Even if anonymous logins are permitted, an anonymous user will not be able to do any file operations what so ever. They are simply allowed to view the contents of the server only. The concept of anonymous user access is diminishing because it is becoming more and more useless as well as a security risk, so most administrators don't allow it. Corporate servers and servers that hold confidential information will most likely use SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) rather than just FTP (or at least they should!), because all instructions and activity information is made private and not viewable by the public or anyone else. Such information can be used by certain resourceful individuals to crack passwords and perform a whole host of other damaging activities.

Tom C W Higgins Professional advice for ftp hosting. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

One of the most well known about examples of cloud computing is the SETI @ Home project and is the best example of multiple computers across the world working together. Large data files that have been gathered from the radio telescopes are broken into small parts and distributed between the computers that are connected to the cloud. Each computer then processes and runs certain pattern matching algorithms on the data in an attempt to find a pattern that may constitute intelligent life. The processed file pieces are then sent back to the main computer along with all the results and stored in a database. Another example of this is the Torrent based file sharing network, where data is spread between individuals and delegated between those who require certain file "pieces".

The problem with these two examples is that they are not true representations of a cloud network. The perfect cloud will know exactly what each connected machine is capable of doing and delegate work in the most efficient manner according to the capabilities of the connected machines. It would also combine all on its disk space, RAM and CPU power, all of which would be at the disposal of ever user. This gives rise to the need for power administration to enforce fair usage policies and system power partitioning. As an example, 75% military, 15% commercial and 10% public. 10% may not seem much for the public sector but if you consider how much computing power is available worldwide right now, it is a substantial amount!

A global cloud is the ultimate cloud network, where every computer on the planet is connected and work spread between them. The obvious advantage to this is the sheer power that will be available for solving tasks. The question that then comes to mind is why bother buying a computer when you could put all these computers in one place? The simplest answer would be convenience, you will need some kind of terminal to log into the cloud and there wouldn't be a building big enough to house all the computers in the world. A major determining factor for transaction speed if the connection between all the connected computers. You might have the power of a million computers but if it takes hours to send instructions to them then that's going to slow things down by quite a lot! Every machine in the network would also need the correct software installed in order to perform tasks given by other machines, so this calls for some kind of centralised software network that all the computers have access to. If a computer receives a job it does not have the software to do it with, then it can simply download it from the software database and get to work. Again this is why the connection speed of the cloud infrastructure will be vital, computers will need to send and receive not only instruction sets but also pieces of software, which could have huge file sizes. A major concern regarding cloud computing is security because you don't know who or what is joining your cloud. For this reason it is vital that clouds validate and query every new machine that joins. A big advantage to cloud computing on this scale is data redundancy. There will be so much disk space that storing backups of everything will easily be possible several dozen times over! So if a machine loses data, that data will be instantly restored from other machines when it rejoins the cloud.

Cloud computing may also make certain things we take for granted today obsolete. For instance FTP (File Transfer Protocol) may become obsolete as there will no longer be a need to transfer files between client and server because both will exist as one, and data will be available immediately as is. Web sites will no longer be stored on web servers, they will be synonymous with the client/user! Naturally there is going to be a big shake up in the world of web services when this happens, and the only thing that will be left standing that we have today most likely will be the search engines.

The world of cloud computing is slowly starting to emerge but it will be many, many years before we see it on the scale mentioned in this article!

Tom C W Higgins Consultant for internet solutions and provider of ftp account. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

Every webmaster knows that in order to get their website up there and to alter pages etc they need to access their web host via FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol that is basically the language the systems use for transferring files. Pretty simple! For the majority of people FTP is a suitable solution for all file transfer needs and web maintenance tasks, but many would argue that it is not that secure. When you work with normal FTP, all your instructions and session information are public for all the world to see. This is of little concern to your average webmaster who is working with a hobby site or something else that is not confidential. The problem comes when people are looking to upload and work with sensitive information and files.

This is where SFTP can come in to secure all those FTP transactions, making everything your doing secure. Transferring files and data over an SSH connection is known as SFTP, which simply stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol. Many FTP client programs support SFTP but people often think they don't because it is often simply referred to as SSH. This leads to a lot of confusion for amateur users who don't know what the effect is of transferring data over SSH. More and more web based FTP clients are also allowing for SFTP connections through their servers.

In order to use SFTP, your web host must have it enabled for your account. Many low end web hosts do not allow SSH over FTP and so you can not secure your connection to the server when transferring files. This is why for businesses and individuals whose website is very important to them financially or otherwise, should invest in some high quality web hosting. For purely storage and remote access purposes, then an FTP hosting company that provides FTP over SSH is strongly recommended. FTP service providers are on the rise as remote storage becomes more and more popular, and secure FTP often comes as standard nowadays. SFTP is a completely new protocol that has been designed from the drawing board, and is not simply a mish-mash of FTP and SSH which is a common mis-conception. SFTP is also misinterpreted as simple file transfer protocol, which has nothing to do with being secure at all.

SFTP is much more versatile than the traditional SCP (secure copy protocol) method that can only transfer files, as opposed to the full range of operations that can be performed by SFTP such as the renaming of files and more importantly the resumption of interrupted file transfers, as well as many more.

If you are working with mission critical files that are vital to the survival of your business or bank account, then pay the extra cost for a secure file transfer service that is reliable and fast!

Tom C W Higgins Professional advice for web based ftp. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

With FTP storage space becoming more popular and gaining popularity, especially around the blogosphere, it is important not to forget that your remote storage could easily be compromised. The simplest method to secure the date your working with, either during transfers or when your files on your server, is to simply archive them. This can be achieved with applications like WinRAR or WinZip, where you can just use them to archive your files and password protect them, not necessarily compress them. It is very difficult to crack an archive password, especially if it's a large or complex one. The most common technique to cracking such passwords is to use a brute force attack where many random passwords are attempted. If your password uses non standard characters and is large, then attempts that use this method will most likely be futile.

Some server setups allow you to upload archived websites and have all the files within the archive accessible to visitors and viewable just like a normal, un-archived website. If such an archive is compressed, then it may increase the time needed to access the pages of the website due to the server having to decompress each file the visitor requests.

A more complex way of encrypting all of your FTP commands and activities is to use SFTP. Not to be confused with Simple File Transfer Protocol, this simply means secure FTP, which is basically FTP over SSH (a secure connection). This is only slightly more complicated to set up than normal FTP, and your web host or ftp storage provider must have it supported by their server setup. SFTP encrypts transfers and commands that would normally be visible to anyone and someone with the know-how could easily intercept them and alter the commands to do their bidding. This could be anything from stealing your data to deleting it! SFTP eliminated that possibility by encrypting your access traffic.

SFTP is useful if you find yourself doing a lot of work with remote files, like blogging or managing your web empire on the go. When that is the case, you will most likely want an FTP client that runs from a mobile device, like an iPhone. Most mobile FTP clients do not support SFTP, but there are one or two out there that do. It may well be worth investing the time and perhaps money in getting one.

If you don't work with remote resources that often, then the archival method is a good idea because it is very secure and simple to do.

FTP has been around for a very long time and security is something that is rarely ever thought about when people are working on their sites performing uploads etc. For large, high profile companies, securing your FTP is vital to ensuring the well being on your data!

Tom C W Higgins Professional advice for web based ftp. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

FTP has gained many more uses since it was first developed over three and a half decades ago, before TCP/IP was created. In the beginning it was only used for basic commands and was the primary method devices used to communicate with each other. NCP (Network Control Protocol), which was a very basic form of TCP was for controlling network traffic. Remember, there was no Internet as we know it in those days. The only similar thing was ARPAnet, which was miniscule and only used by a small number of developers. As FTP evolved, it was given more commands and consequently became far more useful, and became the main thing to use for uploading and doing work on web sites. Other evolutionary steps included becoming more secure and mixing FTP with other protocols like SSL and SSH, which gave birth to SFTP. SFTP is a much more secure method of transferring files between machines, but is often hard to configure because of firewalls etc.

As time went on developers came up with more and more inventive ways to use FTP and it soon became the backbone for many new concepts such as cloud storage and online collaboration. Naturally, such high profile concepts needed to be secure and that's why secure FTP is now gaining popularity and exposure.

Email is something else that can be used with FTP in a number of ways. Using one of the many available programming languages such as Pearl or Python, email attachments can be uploaded to the server immediately when the server receives a new email. This is something that would be setup on the mail server and not the user's machine. Another thing that is very popular is web based email, where the users email account is entirely online. The advantage to this is that it can be accessed from anywhere at anytime, and doesn't require the user to perform any complicated setup processes they might normally have to do.

Another role FTP can play in email is as an internal communications platform for businesses of any size. Such application would be bespoke to the client and store all the account information in a database like MySQL. This is not exactly email but more of an online message board system where users would log in, and have all their information, including new messages etc presented to them straight away. This system can be made even more secure by storing all attachments and data in encrypted archives, which eliminates the need for any kind of secure FTP. This makes the whole thing easy to setup and use, without having to configure any firewall settings etc.

Tom C W Higgins Professional advice for web based ftp. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

Reseller hosting was born out of a discovery that many a webmaster often had far more than they needed on their hosting packages. What you would spend on a good shared hosting account would be between $20 and $40 per year, but would you utilise everything in the package to call it value for money? In all cases like this you are spending more for something you aren't fully using. A good solution to this was to lease out your space and bandwidth to others for a price. In many cases, this allowed webmasters to completely cover their own hosting costs and have a little money left over! This was the first occurrence of reseller hosting, which gave webmasters another channel of revenue from their websites.

Reseller hosting has developed to the point that big hosting companies have packages specially for people who are looking to become their own miniature hosting company. A side to the coin that you may not have considered is that you are responsible for policing the sites that are created by customers who sign up to you. That means you will have to watch out for customers creating illegal content, such as certain kinds of pornography, hacking tools and other undesirables. If you don't police your package sufficiently, it may well be you taking all the stick and having your reseller account banned! If all goes well with your reseller hosting venture then you may find it's time to upgrade your services so you can accommodate more customers! The next level up is to upgrade your reseller account that you have with your provider to a dedicated server. This means you have a whole server just to yourself, with far more storage space, bandwidth and processing power than you ever had before with your reseller hosting package. Before you start selling your hosting packages, you will need to split your new server up into multiple, virtual servers. In order to do this, you need to make sure your dedicated server's CPU supports virtualisation, otherwise you will not be able to create virtual servers. A typical scheme for this method would be to have a main virtual server that accommodates your typical shared hosting accounts and then a number of other virtual servers which you would sell on to high end consumers, like businesses. Of course you could always keep asking your provider to upgrade your dedicated server as demand for your hosting grows, or you can do the next best thing which is to have your own server a bit closer to home.

If things are really going well for you, it may be time to bring everything in house! That doesn't mean filling your bedroom with servers, but rather open a small office and run your own servers to accommodate your growing hosting business! This entails much of the same sort of things you would have done in the previous method mentioned about having a dedicated server at your hosting company of choice. You simply set up your servers, split them up using virtualisation (if you wanted to) and setting up all the accounts for your customers.

Tom C W Higgins Professional ftp services for individuals and businesses. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

Many people leave their home computers on all day, even when they are at work. Eager to get a hold of their favourite game, movie or songs this not only uses a lot of power but is also wasting a lot of the computers potential. Downloading uses but a fraction of the power a computer has and it could be doing something far more useful than sitting idle while it downloads! In a way, many people are using their computer as a server in this fashion if they are using one of the many torrent apps, as they will also upload while they are downloading due to the nature of file-sharing and torrents.

If you're going to leave your computer on no matter what, regardless of parents/partner complaining about the power bill etc, you may as well get a lot more out of your machine in several ways. The first and easiest way is to take part in a cloud like SETI at Home. This way you are contributing to mankind's exploration of the universe! This uses your CPU to process chunks of satellite radio data in hopes of finding an intelligent signal from a far! This is probably not going to be the most popular idea out there, so there a few other ideas. You could install Apache or IIS and setup your computer to behave as a web or FTP server which will allow you to host your own website from home, but to do this you will need a domain name unless of course you're happy with the URL being your IP address which it will be by default. If you do buy a domain like yousite.com, then you will need to point the domain name space servers at your machines IP address, and never change that address or you will have to retarget the DNS servers again, which can take hours to take effect!

Something that would be very useful to someone across a variety of professions including students would be to set up your own FTP server. This is similar to the web-server idea and will still require Apache to be installed. Because it is just an FTP server (a place for you to store your files remotely) you will not need to setup any other complicated things like PHP or MySQL etc. Once you setup the FTP server any file you place on it will be accessible to anyone, anywhere unless you specifically state who can access it. You can do this by creating directories on the server and for each directory create a.htaccess file that requires a user to enter a correct username and password. If you know the IP address of the computers you will be using to access your home FTP server, then you can specify in the httpd.conf file what IPs are allowed to access your files. The most secure thing to do is to apply both of these options, because even if someone uses your other machine at work etc they will still need a password to get at your files!

There are a lot of things you can do with your home computer while it is sitting there happily downloading away. If you're going to use up all that power then the least you could do is make use of it!

Tom C W Higgins Advanced web based ftp solutions and services. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

For most small businesses with a handful of staff, a powerful server is not needed. In fact a server isn't needed at all, and the machines in the working environment will do fine connected to each other through a hub and access the internet through a router.

It's when businesses start to recruit more staff and find a need to have more machines connected together for data sharing and remote internet access that problems start to crop up. A simple LAN network can not share programs and resources as efficiently as servers, i.e. if a user is accessing a file on the server, other users are unlikely to be able to access it too. That is not the case with a proper server configuration. Administrators may also start to find a need to implement more security regarding who can access which files etc.

Windows based servers that are using a server based OS like Windows Server 2003 etc are able to setup domains and user accounts on the network. This is very useful for setting file/directory permissions for individual or groups of users. A scenario for this could be that the sales manager has access to all home directories of the sales staff, but the sales staff only have access to their own directories and not that of the others. The typical application that you can use to do this is the active directories program that comes with Windows Server 2003. Within that you can setup your domain, assign computers, groups, users and much more. It also lets you create passwords for each user which they have to enter if they are to log onto the domain. Normally that only needs to be done once when you setup a client, you would enter this information such as the domain to join along with the password only once. That machine will then always be on the domain.

Another important thing to do is to setup what resources are accessible to what user or group of users. This process is the same as if you were to share files and directories in a workgroup on a much simpler network. The file or folder to be shared is located and then simply shared to the users who are authorised to use it. Permissions can be set to only allow a user to view, read or write to the contents of the files or folders. Naturally, the person who the folder belongs to will have full control, were as perhaps other members of that group can only see the files and not alter them in anyway.

Another important element to a fool proof business network is to have every member of staffs work and email stored on the server together with a daily backup procedure that runs at night. Outlook data files can be stored on the server along with every users Desktop, My Documents and any other important working directory.

As your business grows, so too must your IT infrastructure. If it doesn't then your business will experience growing pains in the form of problematic access to resources and slowed connections if your internet line is being shared by many users.

Tom C W Higgins Advanced ftp service solutions. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

When it comes to upgrading your server you may want to consider buying and building a new one from scratch, because your old server could offer some redundancy if either of them were down. If you business relies on being connected to the internet or your phone system connects through your server, then you really want to be able to have another server kick in if the one goes down. Active directory resources will continue to be available to users on your corporate domain as well, provided that which ever server you are using as a backup is an exact mirror of the other. This effectively means there will be no downtime for getting the server back up again, and your company won't lose money through missed sales etc.

When buying the parts for a new server, you must consider carefully what exactly it is going to be doing most of the time and what you need it to do. For high speed bootups and fast access to expendable resources (like installation files for common programs), then you might want to invest in a good quality SSD drive. I mention expendable resources because you would not store user files on this drive because SSDs have a shorter life span than traditional rotary drives. Important files and user data would be stored on two or more rotary drives in a mirrored RAID array. This make it so if one were to fail, the data would still exist on the other as a backup. The reason you would want to put your operating system on the SSD is that this will allow you to start your server up faster after a crash and allow your users to work with files on the server much faster. Many believe that having SSDs in RAID-0 will give massive performance improvements but they are sorely mistaken! It is much better to invest a little more into a SATA3 SLC SSD. That is a single layer solid state disk that is much more reliable than MLC (multi-layer cell), they are also slightly faster.

Many companies believe that you must keep your server in an air-conditioned room. This is a very easy but extremely expensive option to keep the hardware cool. Another option exists and that is to have everything cooled by water. A powerful water cooling system would cost between $400 and $600, perhaps more depending on your server setup. That compared with an air conditioner which can cost over $4000 including installation makes it seem like a much better option! The cost of running a 12 volt pump is also significantly cheaper than running a 1kw cooling solution 24/7! A water pump is also more reliable than an air-conditioning system, and if something were to go wrong with it, it is simply a matter of replacing the pump which is only a 5 minute job if you have one on hand. An air-conditioning system could be down for weeks which is bad news if your server over heats easily!

Tom C W Higgins Provider of high quality ftp service. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins

PHP is a very powerful tool for any webmaster, allowing them to create bespoke web tools to aid with day to day tasks such as managing link partners, mailing lists, SEO and much more. Cross site scripting or inter-site scripting is a technique used to spread the resource usage a script has over multiple servers. The terminology is not to be confused with XSS, a security vulnerability that is found in web applications where attackers can add harmful scripts to the website. The idea is to give webmasters the ability to run powerful and resource intensive scripts without being banned by their web hosting provider.

Despite most web-hosts only allowing a maximum script execution time of 30 seconds, which is the default setting found in php.ini, it can be extended in scripts that use the maximum execution time function (set_time_limit()) and set it to a different value. As an example, maximum execution time could be reset to 10 seconds each time a loop completes. If the loop continues forever, then the script will never cease executing. This is what can get your hosting account banned as virtually all hosting companies will state that excess use of server resources is a breach of their terms and conditions.

Depending on the complexity of a script, made in either PHP or ASP, the server resource usage can be very high indeed. To minimise usage and attempt to avoid detection by the web-host, developers can insert a number of sleep(x) statements (where x is the number of seconds to wait for) to make the script go easier on the server. The problem is that although this solution works most of the time, it really isn't practical for mission critical applications because those sleep statements add up resulting in a lot of wasted time.

Of course, the ultimate solution is to set-up your own server specifically for the purpose of running your own scripts without the restrictions imposed by the majority of web-hosts. This isn't an option for non-server savvy webmasters who don't have the time to learn how to set-up and manage their own server. So the next option is to spread the resource consumption your script uses over multiple servers, from different providers. Most established webmasters may well have more than one website, so this is a practical option that is much easier to do than creating your own server at home. It is especially easy to implement if the developer has made their PHP script object orientated rather than procedural, but either will work well across multiple servers to get the tasks done. For instance, if we have a script that checks to see whether our link partners are still linking to our website, two or three servers could be home to a script that is just used to do the checking and MySQL interactions to retrieve and process the data on link partner urls, and another server could house another script that sends out automated emails reminding partners to fix or correct their link to us.

One of the main function sets to use for this kind of cross site scripting is Curl. Curl is a library of functions that can be used to build these connections between scripts on different servers. The "master" script can build the tasks that need to be done and post them to the "slave" scripts on the other servers. Those slave scripts then post the completed results back to the master script. Results will often be contained in a variable which looks something like "$MyVar". Curl was specifically developed to allow efficient and powerful interactions across urls. Most web hosts support Curl as it is a part of any modern release of PHP. If you web-host doesn't have it enabled, then cross site scripting will not work.

Don't let your enthusiasm for coding get your website banned!

Tom C W Higgins Provider of professional advice on servers and ftp hosting. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_C_W_Higgins