We provide an FTP site for clients to upload files to for us to work on. New customers often have trouble with FTP transfers. We would like to add the ability for new customers to upload files using HTTP through their Web browsers and have these files placed as if they had been uploaded by FTP. We run our FTP server in-house, and our Web server is hosted off-site. What options do we have? Will we need to install Web server software on our FTP server to make this work?
There are a number of Web browser-based FTP solutions that route the FTP transfer through HTTP and provide the end user the ability to transfer files using a file-upload form on a Web page. Most of the open source solutions are written in PHP and are designed to run in an Apache Web server environment. You could install one of these programs along with Web server software on your FTP server and do everything in-house. You may also be able to achieve your goals by referring customers to one of the hosted services available on the ‘Net that allow you to upload files using HTTP and a Web browser form to their site, which forwards the file to your server using FTP and the login credentials provided in the Web form on their site. Searching the Web for “web ftp” will return links to a variety of open source, commercial and hosted solutions.
