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[badkarma]

This will show you how to create a FTP account in cPanel. FTP accounts are necessary to upload scripts and other things to your webpage. What FTP is exactly would be too much for this tutorial, as you don´t need to bother with it´s technical details. You just want to upload things, or ? If you want to know what it stands for, and how it works i suggest reading
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. That will give you an insight on the technical side.

First off:
There is a default FTP account created already, but you might want to create additional accounts, and how that is done will try to show you here.

Ok, let´s create the account first before we deal with FTP clients. How do we go on about creating such an account ? The answer, as almost always, lies within cPanel, so log on to it. When logged on you will see this section if you scroll down a bit:

Hmm…look at that option FTP Accounts. Sounds exactly like what we are looking for. So we are a bit of a daredevil and click that icon. cPanel will then show you the FTP account configuration screen which looks like this:

There we go, being asked to create a new account. Actually there is not much to fill in here, basically all you have to do is choose an username and a password. Speaking of the password, it should at least score 60 out of a 100 to be consideres somewhat safe though you will be able to get away with a password scoring below 60. But for the sake of your own security i suggest to go for a reasonably strong password. Halfway done filling out the form, just two more options left that i´ll try to explain now. I won´t go too much into detail and try to keep it simple.

Directory: with this option you can limit access to directories.
Best way to describe this option is a practical example i think. Let´s say you have got a directory called /steven on your webspace, where you would like your friend to upload a few funny pictures or whatever. At the same time you don´t want your friend to be able to get access to other directories above the one he is supposed to use. By entering the directory path in this field you can limit his access to /steven as his root directory. He will not be able to see any directories above this one.

Quota (MB): This limits how much space the FTP account is allowed to use out of your total amount available. If you want this account not to upload more than a total of let´s say 10 MB, then just enter 10 in that field and whoever logs on with that account and tries to upload anything that would exceed the quota will get an error message in his FTP client saying something along the lines of “Disk Quota exceeded“.

Ok, these were the options, now it´s time to create the account. As you might have figured by now, the account creation process breaks loose as soon as you hit the Create FTP account button. When you do that the account will be instantly created and a summary of the details will be shown to you.

That is the summary screen i was talking about. I took the liberty to remove my account details as they really aren´t that interesting. Take care of your details, you will need them later when you set up your FTP client, although you will have them displayed again when you use the cPanel option to configure your FTP client. More about that a little later. For now all we do is hit  [Go Back] and that brings us back to the FTP Accounts screen.

If we scroll down a bit we see a very interesting section, the FTP Account Management. Let´s check out what we can screw up there. In case you don´t know what i am talking about: I am talking about this section of the screen:

This is the FTP Account Management, where you can delete FTP Accounts, change their passwords, edit the Quota (space that account is allowed to use) and finally have a nice option to get help configuring your FTP client. All those functions are pretty self-explanatory i think, so i won´t go into detail there. Just a few words about that Configure FTP Client option:

When you left-click that option you will be given some help to configure your FTP clients. Though the help is somewhat limited to just 3 clients:

   1. Filezilla
   2. CORE FTP for Windows (i still wonder if we can sue that company for taking CORE as brandname)
   3. Cyberduck for all those two Macintosh users out there

These three FTP clients aren´t by far all that are out there. In fact there is like a bazillion of them available, and that is why you are shown the Manual Settings here again. So go and configure your FTP client with them and you should be all set and able to connect to the FTP server.

If anything goes wrong let me know and i´ll try to help as good as i can. Just post a comment with your problem and i see what i can do for you.

If you found any typos in this tutorial…..keep them. They are yours. And as english isn´t my native language i am sorry if i screw up grammar and stuff sometimes, but i hope it was easy enough to understand. If you have any questions or comments, suggestions or just wanna mock at me then feel free to reply here.