How to publish my Bluehost FTP files

I can login using my domain password and put them into the www folder, but i'd rather not use that account.

But that's what it's there for?  I'm sure Bluehost would be happy to sell you another domain to show your files on.

Hello xenium

I'm not sure that I understand your question.

Is this free web space offered by your Internet Service Provider and you are automatically assigned a domain name based on your user name?
For example, if the service provider is "blue host" and your user name is "xenium", the URL of your web storage are would be:
/home4/bluehostcom/bluehost.com/xenium

If this is free or paid-for web storage, have you used some kind of online "site designer" application that automatically created the path for your website?
/home4/mydomaincom/mydomain.com/username

Are you looking for a way to create an FTP file download site rather than a HTTP one?
Standard websites use the http protocol, so the URL would be http://www.etc or https://www.etc, whereas an FTP site would use the ftp:// protocol instead.

If you could possibly explain your question more clearly I am sure that we can help you.

Your question requires more clarification, as it's a bit confusing.

1) A BlueHost account can have many domains.

2) Each domain has it's own files, based on the DocumentRoot of the domain.

3) If you're trying to upload your files to an existing domain, then you just create a directory in the domain's directory hierarch + recursively copy all your files from your local machine to the directory you just created.

4) If you'd like these files to appear under another directory, then you'd register a new domain or you can always create a host on an existing domain, so if your domain is foo.com then create blog.foo.com for your blog.

So... your account is your account. You'll use your account for all your domains.

Hi All, thanks for your feedback, and apologies it seems that my ignorance in these matters is raising more questions that it's answering! My question might even be too basic I'm missing something very obvious.

So here goes to your questions/requests:

Dave Baldwin,

"But that's what it's there for?"

Sorry by "domain" password, I meant the password that allows me to enter as an administrator and manage all the user accounts under my domain (email, ftp..). So same reason for having separate administrator and user accounts.
I imagine there is a way to assign a user access to a subfolder of the website for example.

BillDL,

"Is this free web space offered by your Internet Service Provider and you are automatically assigned a domain name based on your user name?"

No, this is a paid account, and bluehost hosts my domain which I own.

http probably better, but ftp is fine as long as I can use google sheet function IMPORTDATA to access this.

David Favor,

I'm fine with points 1 thru 3.

"4) If you'd like these files to appear...."
Yes I'd like these files to appear.... anywhere publically on the web, I just need to understand what the web address is and/or how to configure things so they do appear.

Many thanks

Since there have been no further replies in days, it sounds like the first step may be to add an additional FTP user to your account. Here are instructions for that.

As to how to access the files via HTTP after they've been uploaded, that depends on how your domains are configured and in what directory on the server you place the files. However, based on typical configurations, if you upload a file called "readme.txt" to the "www" folder, you would access it at http://www.mydomain.com/readme.txt and if you have a file called "july-stats.csv" and upload it to "www/my-stats", you would access it at http://www.mydomain.com/my-stats/july-stats.csv

hi David, thanks for that. I had already setup an ftp account which works fine (i can upload files etc)

I can also see the www folder and I could upload to that using the administrator password.

But I want to use the ftp user account instead - how can i make these uploads visible on the website? Maybe there is some standard way to "point" the ftp folder to the www or vice versa, or some kind of shortcut placed into the www folder structure? (i don't mind to use the admin password to set this up as a one-off)

Thanks again

I did not set any directory, so I guess there is a default default directory.

I don't see anything on that support page that seems relevant, or I don't know what is relevant on that page.

Hi,

You can create a web page with links (a href)
or use a web application or cloud application like Dropdox  that generate public links
then add those links on your web page
The good thing about this, it won't take your web hosting space and bandwith

If you want to display files within a folder just make sure you don't have any index page (index.php, index.htm, index,html)
then everything in that folder will be visible, of course, this is Not recommended to that.

You can always open a ticket to your hosting company and ask for help :)

Thanks, I'd like to do this on Bluehost, so I'll have a better look through the documentation and contact them if any doubt. For the record I'll post back any solution that arises.

If l login with my user account, and do a file listing I can see the following:

ftp> ls
200 PORT command successful
150 Connecting to port 54942
.
..
.ftpquota
tc.csv
226-Options: -a
226 4 matches total
ftp: 29 bytes received in 0.01Seconds 5.80Kbytes/sec.

Select allOpen in new window

If I then login with the admin account, I can do a file listing and see the www folder etc, and also a folder mydomain.com/username, which if I enter gives me the same listing as above.

So that much makes sense to me.

Question I still can't answer: how can I setup my user account to publish my files public on www? eg if i want to make file tc.csv public, can i do this from my user account?

Sorry again if this is a silly novice question, but i can't imagine that websites are only managed by administrator accounts, surely a page for example can be assigned to a specific user. If so how can I do this?

Thanks again

ok bingo, i have just seen that the default path can be edited while creating the ftp user, but there doesn't seem to be an option to edit the path afterwards so i missed this first time round.
Capture.JPG