After all my server problems of last week, I relied very much on a Blogger’s Old But Forgotten Friend, FTP. I was reminded of this when Steve Sutherland of AgentsChat.com dropped by yesterday.

Steve’s been one of my customers for a while and I occasionally help him on his work with his forums. In fact, it was work on his logos that gave rise to several of my posts: AgentsChat – a whole new look and Creating a Clickable Image Map (both of these posts are of general interest).

Anyway, he was experimenting with hiding affiliate links and wanted to use the .htaccess file codes to create 301 Redirects … but I realized that he didn’t know too much about FTP (and I didn’t know much either). I’ll be looking at these Redirects soon.

So what is FTP?

Well, after reading the Wikipedia article on File Transfer Protocol, you’ll know a lot more than I do, that’s for sure! Simply, though, FTP is a way to send files (ie. data, whether it is pictures, files, text, programs…) from one computer to another. Usually, bloggers will have their own host that is hosted at http://www.yourblogname.com, and for the most part, you will not need to access your files via FTP. In fact, some blogging tools make it really easy to upload, and you may not even realize that you are using FTP.

But there are times when you may need to upload or download files via FTP, such as when you are uploading or downloading dozens of files (images or movies), larger files, or special files; then FTP is the most reliable way to achieve this, and in some cases, the ONLY way to do this. So how do you access your FTP site? Well, for most domains, the website is accessed via the FTP:// command (NOT HTTP://) and your website is found at a slightly modified address: ftp://ftp.yourblogname.com (Yes, you’ll likely need to enter ftp twice).

Easy Downloading

For most browsers these days (IE6+7, FF2.0, Opera, etc), you can enter your FTP site by entering the address in the address bar. You will be then prompted for your FTP user name and your password. (These are NOT your blog user name or passwords but will have been issued to you separately).

You will then find a list of the files at your blog which you can ONLY download. It should look something like this. IE works very similarly to Firefox, too.

You are now placed in the ‘root’ or base directory of your account. Here you can see four different folders. But if you are maintaining a website, then you will need to find the directory that has a domain name, investorblogger.com. That is the home of this website. Of the four files here, it is the only one that is visible, but the other files are private files that can’t be accessed via the Internet, except by FTP.

You don’t really need much if you want to download stuff, but uploading is another matter, it’s a little more complicated than downloading, but you need the same basic information, and a new tool, an FTP program.

3 FTP Tools: Uploading large or multiple files

Most reasonable OSes these days include some form of FTP. Windows has two FTP programs, the first of which you already saw. But the second is included in Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer). Simply open a regular Windows explorer and enter the user name and password, and you will enter the FTP site as above.

Then you will be taken to the root. And it should look like the following image:

This time though the view is different and you can now upload, move, rename and delete files. The FTP actions will be a little slower than Windows Explorer proper, but you will find it easy to use. Take a look at the image to see what I mean. A word of caution: FTP does not have a recycle bin. So if you delete a file, it is gone PERMANENTLY. You won’t be able to retrieve the file via FTP. So tread carefully.

There are other tools for FTP, but Windows Explorer usually works without too much trouble. You can also find two other great tools: FileZilla and FireFTP (for FF). Remember to download the Client version, not the Server edition.

Using FileZilla

Set up is a little more complicated for these tools, but they have additional functionality, stability and speed. I’ll show you how to set up one tool, and the basic information should be the same for most FTP tools. Naturally, there are variations but they are beyond the scope of this ‘Introduction.’

This is the setup screen from FileZilla, which is available when you start the program, under File >>> Site Manager. Click ‘New Site’. You will need to enter the basic details as above: but first set the Logontype to Normal. Then enter the host details (that’s FTP.yourblogname.com). Leave the port number (the entry key to your PC) as ’21’. Enter the User and Password. Then hit Connect to connect to the server.

After a few seconds, the screen will activate and a bunch of information will fly by. It will look something like this: reduced in size to hide personal information. Sorry!

• 1. The top box is the messages between your computer and the server.
• 2. This box is the file structure of your computer;
• 3. The box is the current folder.
• 4. This box is the file structure on the server.
• 5. And the final box below is the list of files you want to upload (if any).

Double clicking on any file in either #3 or #4 will copy the file to the other PC. So if you double click on a file in #3, it will copy itself in a few seconds to the server. Obviously you may need to choose the folder where you want to put it and open that folder first. Double clicking on a file in #4 will copy the file to YOUR computer. Try it. When activating either, the files will be listed in box #5 and the instructions and messages will be listed in #1. Confused? I was the first time. Experiment a few times before you do anything that you might regret!

WebFTP: in your browser

If you are really lucky, and your hosting company is smart (like Dreamhost is!), you will be able to upload files with a neat piece of software called Net2FTP that allows you to perform pretty much every FTP action IN YOUR WEB BROWSER. Dreamhost Web Hosting provides this at http://webftp.dreamhost.com (Yes, that’s http:// … not ftp://…). This kind of tool is very handy if you’re uploading only a few files or you’re not working at home, or wherever it’s not convenient or allowed to install an FTP program.

Which then takes you to the root folder as above:

All of the actions that you can perform are listed in the drop down box on the right. Folders are listed below as folders (well that’s a surprise!) and click on the folder opens and lists the contents of the folder. Don’t be scared to play with dummy files and folders, but don’t delete important things. There is no recycle bin!

Caution: FTP does not have a ‘Recycle Bin’ nor does it have an ‘undo’ function, changes are immediate and permanent!

There are quite a few more intricacies that you will discover as you use FTP and encounter problems. FTP is the fastest and most reliable way to upload and download files from servers. As such, it’s a great tool to learn whichever of the three ways listed here you decide to use the most.

Oh, you can find FTP tools for your CRUZER, too. And remember FTP can also mean a “Friend To Publishers”!

Well, I’ve finished fixing the server yesterday morning… so if any visitors had come by in the last two days, they’d have been met by a spinning wheel, as the server overloaded itself.

At first, I thought that I had been dugg like John Cow was recently, but I must admit… after looking at the logs, it was a problem with one of the WordPress installs… One of the blogs hosted on this server had six or seven plugins that hadn’t been used much and were conflicting with each other, WordPress and the server itself. Most of the time, things were fine. But somehow on Saturday, a set of circumstances conspired to turn this plugin into a nightmare scenario that prevented ALL the sites hosted on my server (including HTML sites) from loading. Anyway, …

… This is what I learned from the whole affair. Here are seven steps that can help you find and manage problems.

1. Keep your Wordpress updated. Don’t let old and out of date versions stay on your server or hosting. Often WordPress is patched for SECURITY reasons. Using the most recent versions helps avoid your website being ‘hacked’. There are currently two tracks of WordPress. Whichever one you use, you need to find the most recent version on the website. Legacy Version and Latest Version.

2. Manage your plugins: when you upload a plugin, activate it or remove it. If you don’t use it, why waste the server resources on unused plugins. You can simply move it to your root directory where it can hide away out of trouble. Some plugins will cause problems even when they are just installed.

3. Keep your plugins updated as well. And if you update Wordpress, update your plugins if possible at the same time. With Wordpress 2.3.1 + there is a notification system of new updates for most plugins. If your plugin refuses to work, you had better remove it.

4. When you upload plugins, upload your plugins to the right place. Sometimes the zip files that most plugins use has an extra level of directories, so when you unzip the files and upload the entire folder the plugin is still invisible because it is TOO deep. Other plugins have special instructions that tell you to upload your plugin files to more than one directory.

5. Don’t upload plugins in several places or plugins that perform the same tasks, even if they are unactivated. They may cause problems with the installed plugins or with WordPress. For example, in the site there were three plugins handling sitemaps for Google and Yahoo! So, choose one and remove the others.

6. Keep an eye on your server logs, esp. the error logs that your server generates every night. I noted that some days the files were quite big. Open and read them. You may not understand what the errors mean, but you can google the basic codes easily to give you some idea of what’s going on.

Also, if you are seeing a lot of errors, then you know that somewhere on your server, something is going wrong. The server logs are located usually in the root directory under ‘logs’ and the error logs are stored in an appropriate directory for your domain under that!

7. If you are having problems with server stability, turn off all the plugins. Then slowly turn on each one in an incremental fashion over a long enough period. If the problem returns when you turned on one plugin, you may have the offender! Of course, you should also check the website of the plugin author to find out if there have been any recent problems.

For example, the plugin that was installed had a note that was new which said: “After almost 1000 downloads of this plugin and our own use on multiple hosts we have not heard of any serious issues untill the other day we were contacted about the plugin cuasing a huge overage in traffic for a site it had been installed on. …”

8. Limit the number of plugins and themes you have installed at one time. Each plugin and theme requires space on the server, as well as server CPU and memory. I don’t have a limit on the number of plugins you can have, but it is wise to keep the number down. Some plugins are largely redundant for those bloggers who have more than rudimentary knowledge of HTML and WordPress. For example, plugins for websites information, like Rankings and Signatures can often be mimicked by simple code placed in the theme or in the sidebar.

9. Keep your load time down, too. Often bloggers keep adding Javascripts, sidebars, PHP calls, etc., to the blog sidebars, but each of them slows down the load time for the readers. If you are not sure, you can test your blog with a stopwatch or a load time tool. Try to keep load times under 30 seconds on broadband. Otherwise users may just be tempted to close the window or enter another URL. After John Chow’s redesign, his load time shot up to over 45 seconds.

10. And don’t forget to contact your webhosting support , for more advice. They won’t be able to help much with a number of things because they can’t advise on every possible plugin-theme-application compatibility issue, but they will advise on basic things, and point you in the right direction!

So sadly that was how I spent my Saturday night and most of Sunday morning… fixing a server. Now it’s purring like a cat again, I learned my lesson on what NOT to do, and you guys get a post… ! So I guess it all comes out in the wash!

Let’s hear YOUR server horror stories… What happened? How did you deal with it? What other tips did you learn?