Anonymous FTP Access

Virtual domain account users can allow anonymous FTP access to visitors wishing to download or upload files to your web site as if you were running your own FTP server.

You can enable (and disable) ANON FTP access within Edit Account Information within your account Control Panel. Just check (or uncheck) the check box labeled "Anonymous FTP Enabled".

Anonymous FTP warnings:

FrontPage Users
Enabling ANON FTP on a FrontPage created site can expose private site access information within the user's /_vti_pvt directory. The permissions on the FrontPage directories are, by default, 755. As with any other anonymous FTP usage (this is only an issue on AFTP-enabled accounts), you need to ensure that the public permissions are tight enough to prevent access to those directories. chmod-ing the _vti directories to 700 seems to do the trick - it prevents those directories from being browsed through anonymous FTP.

Security
Anonymous FTP will grant any and all users the ability to access your "upload" directory, or any directory on your domain that has been set for "public" read/write permissions. Anonymous users will have access to upload or download files to and from your domain. You must set the appropriate permissions for your directories to restrict anonymous FTP access. This is needed to ensure that anonymous users will not be able to access any existing files or directories. You can inhibit access to specific files and directories in your UNIX web hosting account using the File Manager by disabling public read and/or write access to the files or folders you don't want people to see (ie. cgi-local). On NT, anonymous FTP access is only available in the "anonymous/" directory.

Responsibility
As the account owner, you are responsible for any and all files that are stored on your domain. This would include files that were uploaded by you as well as by anonymous FTP users. With the use of anonymous FTP, your site is susceptible of becoming a "warez" site. Typically, these are sites that are used by "hackers" to trade (upload/download) illegally pirated copies of software programs with one another. As the account owner, the complete content of your account is your responsibility. If your site becomes a trading post for "warez" programs, you may face legal action that can be taken against you by the programmers/software companies of the copyrighted software.

Data Transfer
Any and all FTP download transfers, anonymous FTP included, will be used in the calculation of the total data transfer for your account. If this total data transfer amount exceeds the limit that is set for your plan, you will be responsibility for any and all overage charges that occur. Please Note: There will be NO exceptions made for these overage charges. Once anonymous FTP has been enabled, it will be your responsibility to monitor the anonymous FTP activity for your account. All anonymous FTP activity is stored within the "xferlog" file. This file contains entries for each and every anonymous FTP upload/download session. This file is located within the /stats directory of your account. There is also a link provided off the "View your web usage statistics & logs" page of your account control panel. You can also have our servers perform certain actions when your data transfer exceeds a pre-defined limit that you can specify. In your "Edit Account Information screen look for the following section:

Disk Space
If you are going to allow people to upload files to your site, make sure you keep track of your disk space usage via your Control Panel. Do not allow your disk space usage to get too close to your maximum disk space allocation or you may experience problems accessing your site via FrontPage and/or be unable to upload or modify files. You may purchase additional disk space if necessary in 5MB blocks.

Once you enable ANON FTP in Account Settings within your Control Panel, files can be accessed anonymously via a web browser using the following URL format:

ftp://ftp.yourdomain.com/<FILENAME>

Anonymous visitors wishing to access your site via FTP client (e.g. wsftp) must use your domain name as the FTP hostname, userid of anonymous and password of guest.

Note: If ANON FTP is disabled and someone attempts to access your site anonymously, they will actually see RapidSite's anonymous FTP directory although the page title will read "FTP root at ftp.yourdomain.com".

How to set a custom "Anonymous FTP Welcome Message" on our UNIX servers:

When setting up anonymous ftp access to an account, you can set up a welcome message for people browsing the site with a web browser. You can easily accomplish this by following these instructions:

Create a text file called welcome.msg
(Must be in lower case characters.)
Place your greeting message into the file and save the file.
Upload the welcome.msg file to the root directory.
(Transfer in ASCII format)
Now set anonymous FTP active for your account.
(See this page for instructions)

Please be sure to set directory permissions for the appropriate directories.

Notes
This will only work when you link to one directory. If you link to another directory after the initial directory the message will not be displayed. But it will be displayed if you come back to the original directory.