Today we’re going to talk about how to create and manage FTP accounts inside your cPanel. FTP is probably one of the most important tools you’ll use early on when working with web hosting because it allows you to move large amounts of files or really, really big files to and from your server and your local workstation.
You can use the username and password that you use to log into your cPanel, and take it to your favorite FTP accounts such as FileZilla or WinSCP and log in directly with that and the site IP. But now I’m going to show you how to create new FTP accounts where you can isolate into particular directories.
What we’ll do here is scroll down to the ‘files‘ section, and we’ll click on the FTP accounts tab. This will take us to the page where we can actually create a brand new FTP account. We need to specify a few things, and the first thing I want you all to do is click on the drop-down for the domains tab.
Create FTP Account From cPanel
We’ll actually choose the domain that we want to work on today. If you’ve got a hatchling plan, you’re only going to have one, but if you have a baby or business plan, you could have multiple. The first thing we’ll do is choose the actual domain that we want to work on because that’s going to specify where that content is in your server.
Today I want to work on hgadmin.com. The next thing I need to do is actually give it a name. The name for this FTP account will be really similar to an email address, so for me, it’s going to be josh@hgadmin.com. Then all I really need to do is choose a password for it.
If you’ve got one saved and it’s nice and secure, you can type it here and then click to paste it again, or you can actually do the password generator to generate a brand new secure password for you. Now I’ve got one saved here on my end, so I’m just going to copy this over and then paste it again for the again section.
Choose Strong Password for Your FTP
I have a nice strong password, which is always good to have for security. Now the next thing I want to talk about is the directory path. This is exactly what access this FTP account will have inside of your server. As you can see here, it’s going to give me access to public_html/hgadmin.com, and then this folder ‘Josh’ is essentially where I’m going to be able to have access.
It’s going to create a blank folder called ‘Josh’ inside the admin folder, and if I’m working on the site hgadmin.com, that’s not going to be really helpful because I can’t put content in the directory where it needs to be. If I want to have either myself or the developer access that specific directory, we’ll remove that so I can access that folder.
- You can also keep going up levels, so if you want to have access to public_html, you erase it all the way to public_html.
- If you want this account to have access to the entire cPanel, so everything in the home directory, you remove this down all the way.
- Essentially that’s how you would manage exactly what directories this FTP account will have access to.
- So it’s really up to you where you want this to have access.
- If you’ve got a developer who’s working on just one site, you can give them access to just that folder.
It works really easily. The next thing you want to do is talk about the quota, and for me, it’s going to be unlimited because I can transfer in and out as much data as I want to. If you want to set a limitation for someone, then you can certainly do that in MB right up here.
What to do after “Account Created”
Once you’ve got all that set, all we’ll do is click ‘create FTP account.’ We’ll get a nice ‘account created‘ signal here, and then my new FTP account has essentially appeared down here. It shows me the path that it has access to, the current usage, and how much quota I have.
So for that little infinity symbol that means unlimited, and I can also change the password, I can change the quota, or I can delete this account if I want to. Now that I’ve got this actually created, all I need to do is copy this over into a text document somewhere, make sure that I have my password saved, and then we’ll go back to our front page of the cPanel and scroll down.
We will grab that site up, and then that, along with the username and password, is all I’m going to need to log into my favorite FTP client. Whether you’re using FileZilla Cyberduck or any other, that’s all the information that you’re really going to need to have access directly to the content that’s on your server and then be moving files back and forth essentially as much as you want to.
That’s essentially it. That’s how you manage, create, and modify FTP accounts in your cPanel. I hope you found this helpful. If you have any questions or comments, leave them below and stay with us if you want to see more.