Just wanted to thank people for their input on choosing a host. I used this board for a month getting different input on hosts for my site with its relatively modest needs and any questions i put up were answered very quickly and helpfully by people. I think this board is a tremendous resource. The only shortcoming i have seen so far is the amount of people who ask for hosting company advice and then do not follow up with their experiences once they choose a host.
For that reason i put up this post with my experiences so far and will follow up in the future letting people know how my choice has worked out. I chose your-site as a host after viewing numerous positive comments about their services. So far, so good. All questions posed to them(both by phone and e-mail) have been answered very quickly and helpfully. I opened the account last Thursday including having them register my domain name and the site is open as of this morning(shorelinetennis.com--nothing on the site yet.)I don't know if this is fast or slow but for my purposes it was fine. They did have a temporary server for me in about 36 hours if i wanted to upload material until the real site was ready.
This does bring me to a couple of questions i do have. They recommend cuteftp for uploading. I downloaded the trial version and it works very well but the limited amount of transfer i will be doing doesn't seem to justify the $39 price tag after the 30 day trial is up. Can someone recommend a freeware program or something less expensive which will do the trick.
Lastly, the your-site customer service staff has been very helpful but the site is pretty light on information for new people as far as setting up the site and using all the features. Rather than constantly asking them questions can someone recommend a web site which will help me get everything running properly.
Thanks again for all the help and i will let everyone know how well your-site works out for me.

I tried cuteftp but preferred ws_ftp to it. The latter is free. Do a search and give it a try I am sure you will use it instead of paying for Cuteftp.

By the way are any other members hosted by your-site.com? How do you find them.

Congrats on making a decision. Hope you enjoy your choice. As far as FTP programs, WS-FTP Lite is free, but WS-FTP costs money. When looking for the download, make sure you get the right one. I don't remember where I downloaded it from but you can go to http://www.thefreesite.com and it should give you the links.

I prefer CuteFTP anyday. Sets you back $40 to get rid of the advertisements in the windows, but well worth it, especially once you customize it to your liking.

WS_ftp is from http://www.ipswitch.com

There's another free one called SmartFTP http://www.smartftp.com It's not as user friendly in some ways as the others but it looks good. I've been tinkering with it on and off lately and am starting to like it more and more.

Cuteftp has never been my friend. Setting file permissions with it is a little unwieldy.

WS_ftp Pro is the best of the bunch in my opinion - mainly due it being pretty no nonsense, "here's what I do, so I'll just do it" approach :) It's not nice to look at, but it does the job well, and does it fast.

Greg Moore

Originally posted by MattF
I prefer CuteFTP anyday. Sets you back $40 to get rid of the advertisements in the windows, but well worth it, especially once you customize it to your liking.

Your post seems to imply that others have advertising but my version of ws_ftp LE 5.08 doesn't, Not sure about newer versions someone I am sure can comment on this. What I like are the following features. Open ws_ftp click connect and I am in ((it remembers password address etc.) Computer based files can be placed in whatever order you want default is ascending based on date created (makes it easy to find revisions you are uploading). Host files can be indexed anyway you like as well. Dislikes: disconnects after 300 seconds and I haven't found a way of changing.

Another good, but old, FTP program is LeechFTP, here:
http://stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~jdebis/leechftp/downloads.html

Completely free, but no longer supported :(

I'm not sure if I somehow managed to do something wrong, but I decided to try out smartftp awhile back and after I tried to do a site to site transfer with it, all my files got deleted. Cuteftp had no problems with it, but I deleted smart about 1 minute later. Programs get one chance with me... they mess up or annoy me, they're gone.

Justin,

Not sure how you managed to pull that off, but considering the program I'd believe it. As I said, it's not too user friendly at first (nor later for that matter). Just free and pretty to look at :)

If/when I need it enough I'll go for WS-ftp Pro. I actually found Cute-ftp almost impossible to use. I suppose it depends on what you're used to.

Oh I almost forgot:
http://www.enriva.com/MagellanExplorer/
I used this one for a while too. It's more towards the Cute ftp end of things. There's a 'adware' free version available.

Greg Moore

[Edited by akashik on 03-01-2001 at 01:33 PM]

Very big list of freeware/shareware ftp clients.

http://www.davecentral.com/ftpclnt.html

Ok, I'm done...

Greg Moore

I'm not familiar with CuteFTP and wonder if anyone knows if a Hoster would recommend that particular program, because they are using FTP in "passive mode" transfer. I know some Hosts recommend WS_FTP for this very reason.

As much as I love LeechFTP (been using it for 2 years and would hate to part with it) I have not been able to use it in "passive" mode. The program instructions don't seem to work and the Author seems to be more concerned with the new version he is working on, than the older versions.

If anyone has been able to use LeechFTP in "passive" mode, please let me know.

Thanks

WS-FTP Lite is my vote. For web sites, search for the file webtutor.exe in your favorite search engine and you should be able to find a nice tutorial that takes you through basic html, tables, frames, etc.

Visit http://www.m6.net/wdsl.asp page which has direct link to FTP explorer, SmartFTP, and various other useful free tools.