If you're trying to upload content, such as large files or images, to your website or BroadSky account, FTP is often the way to do it. FTP ("File Transfer Protocol") is a common "language" for different computers to use to transfer files between one another. "FTP programs" are programs you can run on your computer to enable you to use FTP to send and receive files from remote computers, including BroadSky servers.

Please note that not all BroadSky accounts include FTP access. If you do not have FTP access and would like to have it added to your account, please contact BroadSky.

The FTP program BroadSky recommends for use on Microsoft Windows computers is FileZilla, which may be downloaded from here. The FileZilla documentation explains how to use the program in detail, but to get started quickly, there's a good "quick guide" here.

To connect to your BroadSky server with FileZilla, fill in your domain name in the spot labeled "Address", and put your normal BroadSky username and password in "User" and "Password" fields. Leave the "Port" field blank, and press the "QuickConnect" button. If all goes well you'll be connected to the server, and can begin to upload or download files.

When you connect to a BroadSky server using FTP, you will be limited to which directories you can access; basically, you will only be able to upload and download files from your "home" directory on the server, and subdirectories under that home directory, which will normally include the directory your website, if any, is stored in. If you need to transfer files to a different directory on the server to which you've been granted access, you will need to transfer to and from your home directory, using it as a staging area, and then use SSH and Linux commands to move the files to where they need to go.

One exception to all of this is if you have a Plone website; in that case you can access Plone and it's underlying Zope application server directly using FTP but instead of leaving the port number blank, you will need to fill in "8021" as the port to connect with. Note that when you do so you are uploading and download files from Zope's object database, not the Linux file system.