Help & Support

Web Site Upload

SFTP Software

At Gradient Hosting we support SFTP for uploading your web files, which uses the SSH protocol rather than FTP.

There are free SFTP programs available for all the common operating systems. Below we list our best picks for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

SFTP Programs
Windows	WinSCP *	http://winscp.net/
Mac	Cyberduck	http://cyberduck.io/
	Transmit	http://panic.com/transmit/
Linux	gFTP	http://gftp.seul.org/

Connecting To Us

All of the above programs work in a similar way. Once installed, create a new connection and enter the following details:

If you try to connect with an incorrect username or password too many times, our server may block your IP address for security purposes. If you suspect this has happened, please get your IP address from our site, then send it to us via our contact form and we will unblock you as soon as possible.

Once Connected

When you have successfully connected, you will see the contents of your home folder.
In this folder there will be another folder named www, which is the document root of your site. You should put your web files inside the www folder.

The first time you upload any web files, there will already be a placeholder file named index.html. You can safely delete that file and we suggest you do, as it may override your site's first page.

So that our web server serves your first page automatically, we suggest naming it index.html or index.php (if it contains PHP code), however all of the following will work:

• index.html
• index.php
• index.cgi
• index.pl
• index.htm
• default.htm
• Default.htm

Advanced Alternatives

The scp Command

All Mac OS X and most Linux computers come with a command line SCP program as standard, which can be quicker to use than a graphical option.

Open a terminal and change to the folder on your computer which contains the files you want to upload:

 cd /path/to/web/files

Use the scp program to transfer a file to the web folder on our server:

 scp filename username@gradienthosting.uk:www/

Where filename is the name of the file to transfer and username is your hosting account user name. You will be prompted for your hosting account password, then you will see a progress indicator as the file is uploaded.

To upload multiple files, either specify multiple filenames:

 scp filename1 filename2 username@gradienthosting.uk:www/

Or a wildcard:

 scp filena* username@gradienthosting.uk:www/

(this will upload any files in the current folder beginning with "filena")

Or copy an entire folder:

 scp -r . username@gradienthosting.uk:www/

The dot (.) is important and means the current folder. The -r means copy recursively, so this will copy everything in the current folder and its subfolders on your computer, to our server. Make sure you're in the right folder before running this command!

The sftp Command

If you want more control over remote files from the command line, the sftp command makes it possible to upload, download, copy, move, rename and delete remote and local files.

It is an interactive program, but you can start it with enough information to connect to our servers. First, in your terminal, change to the folder where your web files are, then run this command:

 sftp username@gradienthosting.uk

Where username is your hosting account user name. You will be prompted for your hosting password, then you will see the prompt:

 sftp>

Change into the www folder with the command cd www, then use the ls -l command to list remote files and the lls -l command to list local files. Use the help command to get a full list of available commands and the quit command to finish.

Windows & PuTTY

If you use Windows, the PuTTY suite provides pscp.exe and psftp.exe which can be substituted for scp and sftp in the examples above.