LwEEs.com

There are many ftp client software in the market, for those of you who are looking for a web based ftp client here is a review. First, the basics, ftp stands for file transfer protocol, this technology allows you to transfer files to and from web hosts (among other places.)

I learned about net2ftp.com about 6 months ago, I was at a friend house and I needed to upload a file to my web host, I didn’t wanted to install software on my friends computer so I started searching for a web ftp client. Back then, I remember being frustrated because I’m used to my Mac interface and free windows ftp clients looked weird to me.

The first thing you see when you arrive to net2ftp.com is a form where you input your host information to log in, if you know where in your host you want to go you can select the folder where you want to arrive from this screen. It gives you some options, normal of any ftp client, like login in anonymously, passive mode, SSL mode, binary or automatic, etc.

Once inside you have a bunch of options to work within your files, among the ones I use the most are, upload, delete, chmod, download, zip, and size. These free tool come with its limitation, one example is the size of the file, they claim that you can upload files up to 5MB, in real life I haven’t been able to upload anything bigger than 1MB. It has a time limitation, which is what I think limits uploads the most, of 30 seconds.

You can upload different compressed files and they will show up uncompressed on your host, files like .zip, .tar, .tgz, and .gz. I have to mention to be careful with compress files you create on your Mac, here are some “._” files that ends up being a problem inside a Linux server host. Also, never, ever upload a file that contains a apostrophe, or you will end up with a file that only your host will be able to remove.

You can navigate thru all your files, when uploading file with the same name it replaces the old one with the new one. Deleting file is extremely easy, so be careful when deleting anything here. To conclude you should know that net2ftp is open source, you can even download the code and create your own web ftp client and they offer some integration options with some web-blog sites like drupal.

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