Connecting via FTP to a domain’s hosting is easy enough. But what if you had an add-on domain on which you’ve created a subdomain, and you wanted to connect via FTP to it? As I found out recently, not so straightforward. After fiddling around with the settings in Dreamwever’s FTP — and giving up after it didn’t work the first time — I finally succeeded. So this quick post is to show you a snapshot of the settings that worked. Conceptually, of course!
Settings
Explanation
The way in which server folder structures are configured (at least on Apache administered via cPanel) is that there is a main folder called public_html or www where all web site files that are to be accessible via the browser are placed. This is the so called root folder.
If you create a subdomain, a new folder is created inside the root folder. So for example, if your domain is example.com and you create a subdomain called subdomain.example.com, the folder will actually be at www/subdomain/. This is where the subdomain’s files will be placed.
Well, it turns out that if you have an add-on domain, it’s folder will also reside in www, so in our case we’ll have www/add-on.com/. This is where it gets tricky. What if you create a subdomain for the add-on domain? Answer: the sub domain is placed under www as well, and NOT inside www/add-on.com/. That’s why we’ve specified the subdomain’s root folder as such above. Trying to connect to subdomain.example.com as the FTP address was to no avail. Using public_html/subdomain/ didn’t work either. It had to be as shown above.
Hope someone finds this useful!