Hosting Terms
What is FTP?
FTP in plain English — the meaning, the comparison, and why it matters to anybody running a website.
Straight answer first
FTP is the veteran file-transfer protocol for moving files between your computer and a server, and it should now only ever be used in its encrypted forms.
The sections below open it up properly — how it works, why a site owner should care, and a concrete example of it doing its job.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
0
Terms left unexplained
100+
Definitions, cross-linked
Real
Examples from real kit
Free
To read, naturally
Plain FTP sends your username, your password and your files across the network in the clear. That was tolerated once and is negligent now. FTPS wraps the old protocol in TLS, while SFTP is a different protocol carried inside SSH and is the modern default with identical day-to-day workflows.
The workflow survives because it is simple. Open a client such as FileZilla, drag files from one pane to the other, and wait. Bulk transfers that a panel file manager makes tedious are trivial here.
The everyday comparison
The removal van of the hosting world. Nobody admires it, everybody needs it eventually, and these days you hire the one with proper locks on the back doors rather than the open flatbed.
Keep that picture in mind and most of the documentation you will ever read on the subject stops being mysterious.
What it means for your own site
You will reach for it during migrations, bulk uploads and recovery work, and the choice between the plain and encrypted versions is a genuine security decision hiding inside a thoroughly mundane tool.
You do not need to work at this layer every day. You need to recognise it when it explains something, which is exactly the moment this page earns its keep.
FTP out in the open
Restoring a site from a local backup, an owner drags the wp-content folder up over SFTP in one go — four thousand files queued, transferred and verified by the client without further attention.
Perfectly ordinary once you have seen it, which is rather the point: most hosting concepts are simple machinery wearing an intimidating name.
How this turns up in your own account
On our hosting this largely looks after itself — the platform applies sensible defaults, and the panel hands you the controls when you want them. The concepts worth reading next: SFTP, Document Root, SSH and Backup.
SSL comes free with every plan and reissues itself before it lapses, so nobody has to diary the padlock.
A glossary written by the people on the counter
We treat unexplained jargon as a service failure. This glossary is the support desk's accumulated translations, published where a search engine can hand them out for us.
Mailboxes on your own domain are part of the plan, never an add-on sold back to you at checkout.
- 100+ terms, all in plain English
- Everyday comparisons and real examples
- Related concepts linked together
- Written by the people on the desk
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Grounded in real kit
Examples point at hosting you would actually use, not at an abstract diagram.
The next reads, mapped
Read on into SFTP and Document Root — terms rarely stand alone, so the neighbours are linked.
Plain English first
Every term defined for people who run sites, not for other sysadmins — jargon translated rather than restated.
Honest about what to skip
Most terms are recognise-level rather than operate-level, and the glossary says which is which.
The stakes spelled out
Not only what it is, but when it turns out to be the answer to a problem you are having.
One term, fully landed
FTP defined, pictured by comparison and placed in your own control panel — recognise-level in a single read.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Find it in your own account
The quickest way to learn a hosting term is to find it in your own panel; five minutes of looking beats an hour of reading about it.
- 2
Check what the defaults are
Our platform ships sensible defaults for this — check rather than assume, and you will know your setup instead of hoping about it.
- 3
Follow the terms next door
Concepts travel in packs — SFTP, Document Root and SSH finish this one's picture, and each is a two-minute read away.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- A free SSL certificate on every plan, reissued before it lapses
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
FTP, FTPS or SFTP — which one should I actually use?
SFTP wherever it is offered, which on our plans is everywhere: encrypted, firewall-friendly and supported by the same clients. FTPS if some legacy system insists on it. Plain FTP for nothing at all, since it announces your password to every network it crosses.
Is FTP obsolete now that every panel has a file manager?
For one file at a time, largely yes. For bulk work — hundreds of files, whole folder trees, automated syncing — a transfer protocol still wins comfortably. The tool survives because the job it does has not gone anywhere.
Are backups included, and can I put one back myself?
A backup is taken daily on every plan, and the restore is yours to run from the panel in minutes — files, databases or both, at three in the morning without waiting on a ticket. Keeping your own copy offsite as well is never a bad habit, and nothing here stops you.
How quickly can I be up and running?
Minutes, not days. The account opens the moment the order clears, the domain — free for year one on annual plans — attaches straight away, and the one-click installer puts WordPress or any of 400+ applications on the page before you leave your chair. Already have a site elsewhere? Hand it over and we move it free, usually inside a day.
Which control panel comes with the account?
cPanel, which the whole trade already knows. That means every tutorial online matches what you see, your backups restore onto any cPanel host anywhere, and what you learn here stays useful for life. Plesk and DirectAdmin are stocked on specific plans for anyone who prefers them.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
How do I pay, and does it bill again on its own?
Orders go through a secure checkout by credit or debit card, and the renewal is taken at the same price you first paid. Every invoice sits in the client area for you to read, and switching auto-renewal off is a toggle in your account rather than a phone call.
Read next
Document Root
The document root is the folder a domain's web addresses map into — the boundary between your site's public…
SSH (Secure Shell)
SSH is the encrypted protocol that lets you drive a server from a text prompt — running commands, moving fi…
Domain Names
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