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Guide For Troubleshooting FTP


The purpose of this troubleshooting guide is to provide you with answers to common problems you might have.

When I try to login to FTP it says, "Login Incorrect" or "Host Not Found."

For the first week, we recommend that you use the IP address as your hostname. The reason for this is because your ISP may have not updated their DNS tables yet, or if you are transferring a domain name, it may not be completed yet. After about one week, we advise that you use your domain name as the host name. For more information about transferring your domain name and why your ISP has to update their DNS tables, please see the below question.

If you are using the correct host name and you are still having problems, make sure your username and password are correct. Remember that your username and password are case sensitive. Another thing you can do check to see if you are connected to the Internet. FTP will only work if you are connected.

When I access my site I get a page that says, "This site is under construction and will be available soon" even though I have uploaded my site.

When you login via FTP and go into your var > www > html directory, you will see a file by the name of index.html. This is the file that is displaying the message: "This site is under construction and will be available soon." You need to delete that file and replace it with your own index.html file. Your main page must be named index.html in order for it to load when accessing it by http://www.yourdomain.com or IP address.

If you are still having problems, make sure that you are uploading your files inside of the var > www > html directory.

When I view my website there are broken images and links that don't work.

Remember that files are case sensitive. For example, if in your HTML document you have a link to CONTACTINFO.HTM but you named the file contactinfo.htm, it will not work. The same thing goes with graphics and all other web documents. What you have in your HTML must match up with what you name your files. Also check to make sure you have everything in the correct directory and that matches up.

When I try to access my site (http://www.yourdomain.com or IP address) it says, "Forbidden, You don't have permission to access / on this server."

This is caused by not having an index.html file inside of your www directory. Once you upload your index.html file inside of your www directory, this error message will go away and that page will load.

When I try to FTP to my site it says, "Quota Exceeded."

This is caused by not having any space left on your account. You will need to remove some files or upgrade your account. If you wish to upgrade your account, please contact us.

I receive a syntax error, what do I do?

If you are receiving a syntax error, your will need to change your username to user@yourdomain.com.

 Important FTP Server Disconnect Information

Properly disconnecting from your FTP server is critical to maintaining the availability of your FTP server. To better understand why it is important you should have a little knowledge of how an FTP server operates. Initially when you connect to your FTP server, a single FTP process is spawned. This process is spawned to manage the connection but does not manage transferring your data itself. Once you begin to transfer files across the connection additional processes will be spawned to handle the transfer up to FTP process limit imposed by your hosting provider. As you can see, generally speaking, successful use of an FTP server will use more than one process. Your FTP client does control the number of processes that are spawned and when those processes will die off after the transfer is complete.

Now that we have a simplistic description of what is happening we can also establish why proper use of your FTP client is important to maintaining server availability. As you can see there is some responsibility placed on your FTP client to manage the FTP connection and processes. If a disconnection is handled improperly, your FTP client isn't given the opportunity to clean up after itself and can potentially leave FTP processes running on your server indefinitely. This only becomes a problem when you try to establish a connection to your FTP server and the FTP processes left running from improper disconnects are equal to or higher than your FTP process limit.

To allow your FTP client to properly close the connection you should find and utilize the disconnect function if your client supports the functionality. You should avoid simply closing the application unless this is the only option that your client supports.


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