Anonymous FTP Access

From the FTP Manager screen you can also set up or control anonymous FTP access. Anonymous FTP allows people without FTP accounts to access a special public_ftp directory to upload or download files.

Note

Anonymous FTP access (especially anonymous FTP uploads) can be a big security risk, so your web host may not permit you to turn this feature on. If anonymous FTP access is turned off on your web server, accessing any of cPanel’s anonymous FTP options won’t affect anything. You should contact your web host if you want to know if they support anonymous FTP access.

To turn anonymous FTP access on or off, you should click Setup Anonymous FTP Access from the FTP Manager screen in cPanel. You will be presented with two simple checkboxes. The first allows you to offer anonymous (public) FTP access to ftp.domain.com (only the public_ftp directory). The next checkbox allows anonymous (public) FTP upload access to your ftp.domain.com/public_ftp/incoming/ directory. Both of these items should be unchecked for security reasons unless you are certain you want to offer anonymous FTP access.

Note

Please note that to offer complete anonymous FTP access (especially uploads), your account may need to be assigned a dedicated IP address.

If you want people logging in via anonymous FTP to see a custom message from you when they log into your server, then write it here. This will only get displayed if the FTP client the person is using displays messages from the server. Some web browsers will display this message when accessing your account via FTP, but many people turn off viewing such messages especially if they are using a dedicated FTP program. In most cases, if the message is not displayed on screen, it is still written to the user’s FTP transcript (log).