FTP is very risky; use SSH for versatile remote connections

It is amazing that FTP is still widely used and even promoted (by inaction and implication) by most commercial web hosts. Using FTP to send files to your web server, and even having the FTP service running on your web server is equivalent to making banking transactions without SSL enabled - the door is almost wide open and you could be setting yourself up for disaster.

SSH

SSH has been around for a long time and there are now many commercial and freeware tools that enable you to get at least the same functionality as you have always had from your FTP server but without the risk. Notably, you need to generate and use a private/public key pair to make your SSH connection water-tight. Using any SSH capable application such as PUTTY to connect to your remote server, or locally in your Linux machine, you can generate a key pair base don a paraphrase using the following command.

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

Taking SSH to the next level

There is a small commercial application called SFTPdrive {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SftpDrive} that enables windows and Mac users to configure remote machine-resources to be accessible like network drives mapped to be accessible locally. You do not have to pay for this feature if you have the skill and patience of configuring a tunneling setup with Putty (SSH tunneling), and map drives through the tunnel