Filezilla

A lot of whom have heard about FTP, but not much people know how often they are using it or how exactly it works. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is required for file transferring, but telling the truth you don't need to get deeper into this. Most of the servers are offering FTP access to the files, but now, when the 3 epoch of web has come, there appeared a lot of different and useful new alternatives, which made FTP not a such useful thing. But we still use it widely. So why not get all what you can out of FTP ? A lot of who are using Windows Explorer to connect to FTP server, but it is slow, not comfortable and even worse, has only few lame features.

Filezilla, is one of the FTP clients that I would really recommend using, it is fast, user friendly, does not need a lot of resources, the main thing is that it is free and open sourced. It is very stable and can have two types of database storage - XML and Windows Registry. But it's not only a client, Filezilla can be an FTP Server, but I would rather use other applications as FTP servers. Filezilla can send and receive files from/into the server, it has support for SSL/SFTP and even GSS. It has an automatic ASCII/BINARY method recognizer, it can use different proxies and firewalls while connecting to the server. And of course the simple functions like keep alive, chmod, passive and active modes, it remembers file transfers too, which is very convenient. It has a very customizable configuration, that it would suite the new users and of course the advanced ones. A very easy to use site manager where you can make a list of all your ftp servers/sites and with a few clicks connect anytime. At one time you can run as much Filezilla applications as you want, it depends on your RAM space, it even can limit the speed for you, if you need it.

So I encourage you to try it and get used to such an FTP client and forget using Explorer, because it really is a big pile of shit, you'll see how much faster your files will start downloading and how everything will become much better. Filezilla has caching abilities and has a similar file browsing like Explorer for local host. You're using Opera integrated FTP client ? not bad, but only for browsing, but not for receiving or uploading files and often connecting to the server. Well, you can try other ftp clients and could choose one out of them, which you liked better, but everyone I know who used Filezilla has left it as their main FTP client, so don't waste your time, use Filezilla and let someone else waste his/her time searching for the best FTP client out there.

FileZilla Project page