To complete the following instructions, you will need to know the access information for your FTP account.
- Managed plan that includes FTP access: FTP information should be included in the email you received when your site was initially set up. You should be able to access this email by logging into the support portal
- Managed plan that does not include FTP access: submit a ticket to request FTP access.
- Shared hosting plans with control panel: you can use the Web-based control panel to create an FTP account.
In order to access your website using FTP, you will need an FTP client. There are many different free options available to download. We have created these instructions specific to one of the more popular programs, Filezilla, but you could adapt them to use with a different client.
1. Download and Install Filezilla
If you don't already have Filezilla on your computer, you can download it here:
2. Use Filezilla to connect to your account
After you've downloaded and installed Filezilla, use the quick connect feature to connect to your FTP account. To do so, you'll need the following settings:
Host: For the host value, enter yourdomain.com.
Username: Enter the username for the FTP account.
Password: Enter the password for the FTP account.
Port: The default port number is 21, but you can leave the port blank here.
3. Download your files
After you have connected, you can then download your files. There are several different ways to do this, we recommend the following:
In the following directions, you will be working within different quadrants in FileZilla. The following screenshot defines them:
In the upper-left window, click your desktop to open it.
In the lower-left window, right click and choose "Create New Directory"
Label the directory so that you will recognize it later. In this example, we named the folder "Website Backup" followed by the date.
Double click the new directory in the lower-left window to navigate to it.
In the lower-right window, click any folder and then hit Ctrl-a on your keyboard to highlight all of the files and folders
Selecting all of the files and folders in the above step will download all files in your hosting account, including files used by your control panel (ex: cPanel, Plesk) or content management system (ex: WordPress, Joomla). If you don't want to backup every single file, you can hold Ctrl on your keyboard and only click the folders that you want.
Linux hosting:
public_html: If you want to download your website files, select the public_html directory
mail: If you want to download your email, select the mail directory.
Windows hosting (excluding FrontPage):
web: If you want to download your website files, select the web directory
mailnames: If you want to download your email, select mailnames in the /var directory.
Right click on any of the highlighted files / folders and click "Download". This will download all of your files / folders to the "Website Backup" folder that we created above. Please note that the time it will take to download all of your files will depend on the number of files that you have and how large they are.
