Create an FTP server – Free and easy

Create an FTP server – Free and easy

If your friends and you want an easy and a fast way to share files, you can create a server on your computer.

A short and free way to create an FTP server (File Transfer Protocol)? It’s actually a protocol which allows you to directly share files from one computer to another over the Internet. If your friend for example has limited space on your computer, he can upload all the files to the server and download them when he needs them.

1. First thing we need to do is to port-forward a port in the router we’re using. The port we need to forward is port number 21. Why? Because by default it’s the port used for FTP. Port forwarding actually means opening a tunnel through the router so that the router wouldn’t reject the connections that are trying to connect to it. How to port-forward? With every router it’s different. Here are the instructions for every one of them.

2. Now once the port is opened, we can create a server using free FTP clients. There are many free FTP clients, but the one we’re going to use is very simple and you don’t need to install it. It’s called CrossFTP. Just download it from here. Select the option shown below;

Once you clicked that, open the file. Select users. A list shown below will appear:

Click save and your FTP server is set. You can enter your server by typing in “ftp://YourLocalIPAddress:21″in the browser. To find out your local IP go to START>RUN>cmd. Here type in ipconfig. The IP address of your computer will appear. That’s your local IP. So if you’re entering the server from the inside, you enter your local IP. But if your entering your server from the outside, let’s say from your friends house you need to know the external IP. That’s step 3->

3. Now your server can be accessed from the outside. The only thing a person needs to know to enter the server is your IP. You can always find out your IP by visiting this site ->www.whatsmyip.org . To access your server from the outside, you need to type in “ftp://YourExternalIPAddress:21″ in your browser.

The problem occurs after a while when your router reboots and your IP address changes. You can always buy a static IP from your Internet Service Provider, but there’s a thing we can do for free is to create a free domain (a name,like a website), so that users of your server don’t need to know your IP, but just the name of the domain.

Here is video instructional