OUCS recommends the use of Secure File Transfer Clients rather than standard FTP clients to access your web space.

FTP access to web space will be withdrawn on Tuesday 19th June 2012.

Many HTML authoring programs come with a built in function to publish files to the web by FTP.

For Microsoft Windows users, recent versions of Internet Explorer (but not other web browsers) can also be used to do this, as shown below:

  1. Within IE, go to the [Tools/Internet Options] menu, switch to the Advanced tab and make sure that the Enable Folder View for FTP sites option is ticked. Also, towards the end of the [Browsing] section of Advanced settings, make sure the [Use Passive FTP] box is also ticked.
  2. Enter the URL of the form: ftp://username@oucsweb.ox.ac.uk where username is your Herald username.
  3. When prompted, enter your Herald password
  4. A window should open containing the folders public_html and cgi.
  5. The public_html folder can then be used like a normal Windows folder. You can upload files by dragging-and-dropping or cutting-and-pasting them into the required location within public_html.
  6. File permissions are automatically set so that anybody can read the files
  7. Check your page, e.g. by browsing to your homepage (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~username)

Alternatively, there are many FTP programs easily available from the web; a powerful open source one is FileZilla (http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/). The general procedure to transfer files by FTP is as follows:

  1. Open an FTP connection to oucsweb.ox.ac.uk
  2. Enter your Herald username and password
  3. Move to the public_html directory
  4. Copy your files to public_html
  5. File permissions are automatically set so that anybody can read the files
  6. Check your page through a browser