Knowledgebase
FTP Timeout & Connection problems
If you are having problems connecting to your website via FTP and are experiencing time out's and or connection error messages then please read this article carefully regarding your firewall & FTP usage.
You may be using some form of software / hardware firewall or router to connect to the internet from home or your office but your firewall can also cause problems when trying to connect to the proper FTP ports on our servers due to incoming port blocking on your firewall.
Normally, when you connect to your website using FTP, your PC will send a request to our server asking for an FTP connection, then our server will accept that request and open a connection back to your PC, so that normal FTP connections are working from "Server to PC" in that direction. Our servers will attempt to connect to your computer using special ports on your PC which can sometimes be blocked by your firewall for security reasons & your own protection.
To correct this issue, all you need to do is enable Passive FTP in your FTP software which will allow you to upload your files normally.
What is a Passive FTP Connection?
A passive FTP connection is where your PC tells our server NOT to force a connection back to your PC and just initiate a 1 way connection from your PC to the server directly, bypassing the server trying to connect back to your computer and being refused by your firewall. A passive FTP connection is where the you connect to the server instead of the server connecting to you.
This is necessary when you are hidden behind a firewall or router of some sort and are unable to forward the correct ports to your computer.If you are still experiencing FTP connectivity problems, you can also try using your IP address instead of your domain name as the FTP Hostname which should rule out any DNS problems when connecting and/or uploading.
If you are still experiencing problems using FTP then please raise a support ticket and give us as much information as possible including your FTP software used and any error messages you may encounter so that we can investigate the problem for you as it may be server related.
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