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I need an easy to use alternative to FTP. I need to store docs and photos but clients need to be able to access easily (need to be able to both upload and download). Inexpenisve or free would be great. Help!

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probably should be moved to superuser or serverfault. – Alexandre Jasmin Apr 6 '10 at 23:19
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Welcome to SO. Your question can not be sanely answered with the little information you provide. FTP is one transfer protocol among many. But what you seem to be looking for is free storage, which is a question better answered on SO's sister site, Superuser.com. Even then, please provide some more information. – Pekka 웃 Apr 6 '10 at 23:21
Are you shopping for an hosting service or looking for the software and protocols to use on your own servers? – Alexandre Jasmin Apr 6 '10 at 23:21
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possible duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/125893/… – Earlz Apr 6 '10 at 23:22

migrated from stackoverflow.com Apr 6 '10 at 23:29

9 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Hands down: OpenSSH SCP/SFTP using WinSCP as a client to connect.

WinSCP is where all of the points are scored. Plus OpenSSH is secure.

I don't have time to list the endless benefits. Contact me directly (xoneill@hotmail.com) if you have any questions. It wouldn't take much to sell you on this solution. Unless the web based solutions suggested here are exactly what you are looking for.

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I've always found WinSCP incredibly easy to use. You can even save the session login info + local/remote paths and open up to the same upload dir with a single click. I believe it can also emulate the Windows Explorer interface. But, alas, I have been unable to convert my boss to SFTP. Whenever we need to send/receive large files, it's still through u-send-it or something similar. – Lèse majesté Jun 20 '10 at 18:36
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I've learned the other day that WinSCP has a CLI interface that you can script against. Had no idea it was ever there. – user33498 Jun 11 '11 at 4:18
up vote 2 down vote

The only alternative that readily comes to mind is HTTP, but it is not as optimized for transferring files. Look for web-based file upload/download scripts and utilities. However to suggest anything very useful, we will need to know what programming language you want to use and other details.

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WebDAV comes to mind. It needs virtually no extra software installation on the clients for any current OS. – honk Apr 7 '10 at 0:44
I've not been too happy with WebDAV. I've run across a lot of client/server compatibility/reliability issues. – Brian Knoblauch Apr 7 '10 at 13:53
up vote 1 down vote

You may want to checkout Dropbox. It allows easy uploading and downloading and sharing and collaborating on folders on your computer. Very much a "just works" program. It's free for the first 2GB and you can get more by referring others. Definitely checkout the tour for a nice, quick overview of what it can do.

It is very different from FTP but it definitely fits the needs you have described very well.

Disclaimer: The first link is a referral that gives both of us more free space.

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Interesting. I'd never tested dropbox's collaboration features. I didn't even know you could share with multiple users. I'll have to try it out. +1 – Lèse majesté Jun 20 '10 at 18:43
up vote 0 down vote

I think you are looking for a web space provider. I personally like myDrive, a swiss service operating by a hosting company. They offer 2 Gigabytes of ad-free WebDAV space for free. They have an english language version so I suppose they are ready and able to serve international customers.

WebDAV is quite a nice protocol that works with all operating systems. On a modern Windows, you can even mount WebDAV shares as network drives.

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up vote 0 down vote

What you are probably looking for is similar to a file host like Rapidshare or Mediafire. Both are relatively simple if you have your own server and can pay someone to code it for you.

FTP would also be fine if you simply limit their abilities to downloading and viewing, not uploading. You could also point them to one of the several free cross platform FTP solutions like FileZilla to use as their FTP client.

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up vote 0 down vote

I have something like what you're asking for on my site - a client area where people can preview, upload and download files. It's run by PHP, with a web interface, and so all the transfers use HTTP. I rolled my own, but there are lotsa other commercial and free ones out there. Doesn't have to be PHP of course - depending on what flavour your server is you could also run it with asp or python or perl.. You do need a web server though.

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Can you tell us more about the way you rolled your own, if this is not confidential info, of course ? Thanks :-} – jfmessier Jun 7 '10 at 14:41
I can't link to the site because it has confidential client stuff on it, but basically I started off with code from here php-mysql-tutorial.com/qna/detail/… and here tizag.com/phpT/fileupload.php then added some javascript formatting stuff to make the UI look better. – stib Jun 8 '10 at 1:20
up vote 0 down vote

Google Docs lets you upload and share a variety of files. It is pretty simple to setup sharing with others. Uploading and downloading in bulk might be a bit tedious though. They only let you upload up to 1024 MB though, so if you have a lot of large files it might not be the best choice.

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up vote 0 down vote

You have to choose:

  • access via browser == ease of use == FTP (or HTTP apps, like Dropbox)
  • fast transfers != HTTP

For having repository of files, any VCS would do, e.g. git

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up vote -2 down vote

Here, let me google that for you: link text

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Snark alert! (make this a comment next time, and be nice :P ) – zenazn Apr 6 '10 at 23:22
Sorry but when someone asks a really vague question that was asked extremely recently it seemed like a decent thing to offer to them. Plus, I'd imagine that the link I sent answered the question based on the vagueness of it. – dscher Apr 6 '10 at 23:24
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@dscher an understandable sentiment, but not the style nor the etiquette on the SO/SF/SU family of sites. If you don't like a question like this one for its vagueness (again, that is totally understandable) you would usually downvote it, leave a snarky comment, or ignore it. – Pekka 웃 Apr 6 '10 at 23:36
What "Snark Alert" does mean and why is this answer downvoted? Is there some special rule (or discussion at meta.stackoverflow)? – Vi. Jun 7 '10 at 14:27

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