Learning how to FTP can be important to move your files from your hard drive to your hosting provider. A few years ago, FTP was the only one way to get a web page from your hard drive to your hosting provider. You had to use a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client. FTP clients are often hard to use, text based, with arcane commands ("get", "put", "prompt", "bin", "hash", etc.). But now there are many other options for uploading your pages.
In Order to FTP You Need an FTP Client
There are lots of really easy to use FTP clients available for both Windows and Macintosh. You don't have to know the commands, or if your file is "binary", just how to drag and drop.
But, the problem with FTP clients is you have to know where to transfer your files. Some web servers allow FTP access to the same URL as your website, but FTP access is often an extra feature. At my last hosting provider, my website URL was web.hostingprovider.com, CGIs were hosted at cgi.hostingprovider.com, I could ssh to shell.hostingprovider.com, and FTP to ftp.hostingprovider.com. The first time I tried to edit my website, I had to find the correct location to do what I needed to do. Your hosting provider may have special URLs for FTP as well. Contact them for more information.
Web Page Management Tools
FTP is a lot less popular with hosting providers because it presents some serious security issues. Instead, many hosting providers give you a website management tool to let you view your files and directories and upload web documents and images to the hosting provider.
