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Second, you’ll need to determine how people gain access to your FTP site. There are several options for granting permission to view, download and upload to your site.

Unlike most Websites, when a user visits an FTP site they must login. By default, a public FTP site uses an ‘anonymous login’. Technically, this means the User Name is ‘anonymous’ and the Password is a user’s e-mail address. However, often with an anonymous FTP site, the user is not required to enter any login information as these values are used by default.

It’s important to keep in mind that anonymous logins should only be granted for viewing and downloading – you never want to allow public uploads to your FTP site. For uploading, you want to force a visitor to type in a unique User Name/Password in order to gain upload access to your FTP site. It’s not uncommon for an FTP site to use a combination of anonymous and password protected logins.

Most FTP server software will detect the ‘home IP’ address of your computer during the FTP server setup or in the text display when the server becomes ‘on-line’. As mentioned earlier, you will need this IP address when setting up a domain name for your FTP site.

Designing Your Site
When setting up your FTP server, the most import design element is navigation. Unlike a Website that has hyperlinks to guide you, an FTP site relies on directories and text-based help files.

I recommend taking the time to create a well organized file structure with easy-to-understand directory names. This will make it much easier to locate files on your site. For example, on my FTP site I have a directory of Web browsers. I have named this directory ‘Browsers’. Within this directory there are a number of folders that contain different types of browsers. I appropriately named these folders by the browser name and version number, i.e. Internet Explorer 5.5, Netscape 6, Opera 5, etc. The installation file for each browser is located within its relative folder. This is particularly helpful since most software file names are cryptic and next to impossible to identify.

Another helpful tool, that most sites don’t include, is a directory file. These files are located within a directory and list every file of that directory accompanied by a brief description. These files are typically plain text but can also be HTML with hyperlinks to directories and files. These files are usually named ‘index’ or ‘dirs’ with a ‘.txt’ or ‘.html’ extension.

A Few Important Tips:

• In order for people to connect to your FTP server it must be ‘running’. And don’t forget to test the server before making it public.
• Be careful not to give users permissions that they shouldn’t have. This is especially important when giving write or delete permissions. You don’t want to end up with a full hard drive or missing files.
• Most FTP servers have a setting that allows users to resume broken transfers. This feature is a real blessing to modem users who often lose connections when downloading large files.
• Keep a log of all server activity. This information can help you out in many ways. Logging can help tell you who is coming to your site and what they are doing on it.
• Make sure that you remove old accounts and organize new ones. Most FTP server software allows you to classify users in groups which can help with this task.

Your FTP server will have many other options that go beyond what is covered here. Feel free to explore these as you get more comfortable with your FTP server. For now, as long as you have taken care of the login issues, have your machine’s IP address, and haven taken the time to organize your files, you’re ready to start running your FTP server.

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