Files & FTP questions

Put your files in the public_html folder, either with the File Manager in DirectAdmin or over FTP. Your homepage must be named index.html or index.php, and it goes in the top level of public_html, not in a subfolder.

Your FTP host is your domain name, and the username and password are the ones from your welcome email — or any additional FTP account you create in Account Manager › then FTP Management. For an encrypted connection, use SFTP on port 26628.

Check the port and protocol first: SFTP uses port 26628, not the default 22, and plain FTP uses 21. After that, try switching between active and passive mode, which resolves most remaining connection failures.

public_html is the only folder on your account that is visible on the web. Anything inside it can be reached by a browser; anything outside it cannot. Your website’s files go in there, and your homepage goes at the top level of it.

Permissions decide who can read, write or run a file. On shared hosting, folders should be 755 and files 644. Never set anything to 777 — it allows the whole server to write to the file and is a genuine security risk.

Compress the folder in the File Manager and download the single archive — far faster and more reliable than downloading thousands of files individually over FTP.

Upload the zip through the File Manager, then use its extract option to unpack it in place. Uploading one archive and extracting it is much quicker than uploading the same files one by one.

Turn on the show-hidden-files option in the File Manager, or enable it in your FTP client’s settings. Files beginning with a dot are hidden by default, which is why .htaccess often appears to be missing when it is there.

Yes, and you should — it is what makes a zero-downtime migration possible. Editing the hosts file on your own computer makes just your machine resolve the domain to Traxio while everyone else still sees the old host.

Create a subdomain such as staging.yourdomain.com and install or copy the site there. It is genuinely separate from the live files, costs nothing extra, and is the right place to test updates before they reach visitors.

SFTP transfers files over an encrypted connection; plain FTP sends your password and your files in readable form. Use SFTP wherever your client supports it — on Traxio it is port 26628.