While most FTP connections usually proceed flawlessly, occasionally you may run into an error or two. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the errors you may get and what to do about them.

Can't Connect To Server

Be sure that your username and password is correct.

If you can not get a connection, insure that your internet connection is working properly, and not sporadically. Sometimes an ISP (Internet Service Provider) may shut down a port or two during maintenance times. This would explain why you may not be able to browse the web but not get e-mail, for example. Or you may be able to use e-mail but not FTP. Another thing to check is whether or not your FTP program is set to Passive or Active transfer mode. If you're behind a firewall, you'll want to use Active mode. For more information, please see Using Passive (PASV) or Active (PORT) FTP Mode.

'Failed to receive response after connect'

Usually this error occurs if you are experiencing network difficulties or there is some maintenance down time. However, you may also get this error if you have more than 3 active FTP connections going at the same time. This can happen especially if you're using Windows XP's My Network Places.

A File or Directory Won't Delete From The Server

Sometimes you may encounter problems deleting or moving a file on the CGI server. Usually this is not an issue with the Web server because unlike the CGI server, the Web server does not allow you to change permissions of a file. The CGI server, however, does. This means that even though you haven't changed the file permissions, some scripts will do this automatically if you upload files or do other file management tasks from within a script program such as Coppermine, installing add-ins in Joomla, and the like. When you go into your FTP program to remove the files and directories, it might not let you. You could try instead to use the file manager within the script program to remove the file or directory instead. If that does not work or there is no file manager to use, then you could contact our support e-mail address and ask us to delete the files and/or directories for you. Click the title of this paragraph for more information about this error and how to contact us.

If you are having other problems with FTP, please feel free to contact us from the Support Menu found on all of our pages. Please be sure to give us the exact text of the FTP error you are experiencing, when you experienced it and what you were doing when it occurred so we can best help you.