You can choose to allow anonymous FTP access to visitors wishing to download or upload files to your web site as if you were running your own FTP server.

You can enable (and disable) ANON FTP access within Edit Account Information within your account Control Panel. Just check (or uncheck) the check box labeled "Anonymous FTP Enabled".

Anonymous FTP warnings:

Security
 Enabling anonymous FTP grants any and all users the ability to access the customer's / aftp directory and its sub-directories. Anonymous users will have full access to upload or download files to and from the aforementioned directories. To restrict this capability, customers must set the appropriate permissions by using the .ftpaccess file.

Responsibility
As the account owner, you are responsible for any and all files that are stored on your domain. This would include files that were uploaded by you as well as by anonymous FTP users. With the use of anonymous FTP, your site is susceptible to becoming a "warez" site. Typically, these are sites that are used by "hackers" to trade (upload/download) illegally pirated copies of software programs with one another. As the account owner, the complete content of your account is your responsibility. If your site becomes a trading post for "warez" programs, you may face legal action that can be taken against you by the programmers and software companies of the copyrighted software.

Data Transfer
Any and all FTP download transfers, anonymous FTP included, will be used in the calculation of the total data transfer for your account. If this total data transfer amount exceeds the limit that is set for your plan, you will be responsibility for any and all overage charges that occur. Please Note: There will be NO exceptions made for these overage charges. Once anonymous FTP has been enabled, it will be your responsibility to monitor the anonymous FTP activity for your account. All anonymous FTP activity is stored within the "xferlog" file. This file contains entries for each and every anonymous FTP upload/download session. This file is located within the /stats directory of your account. There is also a link provided off the "View your web usage statistics & logs" page of your account control panel.

You can also have our servers perform certain actions when your data transfer exceeds a pre-defined limit that you can specify. In your "Edit Account Information" screen look for the following section:

Data transfer notification

Disk Space
If you are going to allow people to upload files to your site, make sure you keep track of your disk space usage via your Control Panel. Do not allow your disk space usage to get too close to your maximum disk space allocation or you may experience problems accessing your site via FrontPage and/or be unable to upload or modify files. You may purchase additional disk space if necessary in 5MB blocks.

Once you enable ANON FTP in Account Settings within your Control Panel, files can be accessed anonymously via FTP client or by using the following URL format: 

ftp://ftp.yourdomain.com/<FILENAME>

Anonymous visitors wishing to access your site via FTP client (e.g. BulletProof FTP or WS_FTP) must use your domain name as the FTP hostname, a UserID of 'anonymous' and their e-mail address as the password.

How to set a custom "Anonymous FTP Welcome Message"

When setting up anonymous ftp access to an account, you can set up a welcome message for people browsing the site with a web browser. You can easily accomplish this by following these instructions:

  1. Create a text file called welcome.msg
    (Must be in lower case characters.)
     
  2. Place your greeting message into the file and save the file.
     
  3. Upload the welcome.msg file to the root directory.
    (Transfer in ASCII format)
     
  4. Now set anonymous FTP active for your account.
    (See above on this page for instructions)

Please be sure to set directory permissions for the appropriate directories.

Notes

This will only work when you link to one directory. If you link to another directory after the initial directory the message will not be displayed. But it will be displayed if you come back to the original directory.

Please note: the information on this page applies to ITS web hosting plans. It may or may not apply to other environments. If you are looking for a feature described here, or better support from your hosting provider, please consider hosting your site with ITS!

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