What Are My FTP Details?

When connecting to your cPanel account via an FTP client you will be asked for the following details:

Hostname
Username
Password
Port
Directory

What are those and what purpose do they serve in an FTP connection?

The Hostname is a domain that resolves to the server that you want to connect via FTP. Resolve is a fancy DNS word which means that the domain’s IP = server’s IP.

The Username and Password are means to associate your FTP account. Each FTP account has Quota (allowed Bytes that can be uploaded/downloaded) and a visible Directory. The visible Directory is the starting directory that the

The Port is a number through which the Server “listens” for connections. Usually, there are many connections to one server and many requests are being made. One request could be over HTTP, other over FTP. The Server “needs a way to distinguish” those connections, thus different services listen on different ports (HTTP on Port 80/443, FTP on 21, etc…).

The Directory is the starting access point for the FTP connection. For example, if your FTP account is set to access just the directory public_html and you enter /entry you will try to connect to the folder public_html/entry.

Let’s find out what your FTP details are! First, you should login to your cPanel account – you can see how to do this from our article here.

Hostname

You can use the Server’s Hostname, this is the FQDN that it resolves to. Basically, this is the cPanel’s login URL, it’s visible in your browser

User and Password

By default, when you get your cPanel account, you can log in via FTP using your cPanel Username and it’s password. You can see how to change your Password from here.

Port

On all Shared Servers that we manage, by default, the FTP port is 21.