FTP and Quick Shopping Cart at Godaddy Hosting

 
This is a new blog.

Here I offer tips on how to
accomplish certain things
while logged in as a Godaddy
web hosting customer. As I
discover how to do something
under Godaddy hosting, I write
about it. That's the basic idea.

Today I'm doing something I've
done many times before. I'm
setting up, or discovering, an
FTP account for myself.

In some cases, I'm able to discover
an FTP account. In other cases,
I have to set one up. I've
forgotten just how you do this
under GoDaddy hosting.

OK. Just tried to do the
obvious thing. I tried to use
the control panel username and
password to FTP into the site.

At some hosting companies, this
will work. At GoDaddy, it does
not.

At some hosting companies, you
can do the following command on
the command line:

ftp ftp.mydomainname.com

Had the above command worked, I would
have tried to use the control panel
username and password as my FTP username
and password. Again, at some hosting
companies this will work. However, not
at GoDaddy.

At Godaddy, the above command hangs.
No response whatsoever. Obviously,
they don't want this to work for
security reasons. Can't say that I
blame them.

These days, FTP passwords are a sensitive
issue for hosting companies. If the
wrong people figure out your FTP
password, they can hack into your site.
Once in, they use your site to spread
malware to other people's computers.

Seems like GoDaddy has gone the way
of many hosting companies and that
is a multi-layered defense. They
layer the protection of the website.

One layer of defense seems to be that
the control panel password does not
work with a domain name URL.

Layering your defenses is a good idea.
The more layers of protection, the more
layers the bad guys wearing the black
hats have to penetrate.

Life is like that. You get your defenses
in layers. Not only does a tiger have
sharp claws. It also has sharp teeth and
night vision. Every animal in the wild
seems to have a layered protection scheme
that protects it from attack by outsiders.

OK. This post did not turn out the way
I thought it was going to turn out. Looks
like the client, in this case, is using
something called Quick Shopping Cart.

Looks like you cannot edit the HTML
directly with this product.

OK. So this is where my quest for an FTP
account ends. The answer seems to be that
you cannot get one.

The obvious reason for this is that GoDaddy
does not want you messing up your shopping
cart by editing it directly. Even if you
did edit it, it would probably be overwritten
by Quick Shopping Cart the next time
you published the site.

My assumption above that GoDaddy does not allow
you to use the domain name URL to FTP to the
site with the control panel password may not
be correct.

In this case, the client does not have a regular
hosting account. He only has a Quick Shopping
Cart account.

I'm unfamiliar with Quick Shopping Cart.
Sounds like a great idea though. Many people
need something like this to get started. Basically,
it is a product that generates a shopping cart
for you.

Ed Abbott