FTP Drag and Drop

Windows users can open up the host file system using an FTP account in Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer and simply drag the catalog .zip folder from their file systems over to the host site, as shown here:

There are a few things to note about the previous screenshot. First, even though you can’t see it, I had to log on using my site’s administrator username and password. You should make sure that anonymous FTP access to your file system is disabled. In fact, once everything has been deployed and is up and running satisfactorily, you should disable your FTP account altogether until you need to make use of it again. Second, you can see that the file is being copied to the public_html folder. This will give the catalog folder a web address of http://www.domain.com/catalog once it is extracted on the other side.

The final point to note is that I had an estimate of about one minute for the total transfer time. This transfer was done over an ADSL line, which is fairly fast—if you don’t zip the files up, you can expect a seriously long upload time because the FTP utility has to create all the files and folders itself on the destination server. Remember, that it’s not only the speed of the connection, but also the speed of the FTP utility being used, that can affect upload times.