A reader of my site asked which program I was using to transfer files between my local computer and my dedicated server. The question looks easy to answer at first glance but actually it is not that easy. I’m actually using two ways to connect to my dedicated server depending on the tasks at hand. I use Putty to connect to my dedicated server when I want to administrate it: create new virtual hosts, ftp accounts and the like. I do use WinSCP for all other tasks, mainly for opening a secure connection to my dedicated server which uses SSH.
I can then copy files from and to my dedicated server using this secure connection. I upload new websites this way or download mysql backups or other files that i want to store locally. Well, today version 4 of WinSCP was released as a beta. The main additions are ftp support (remember it supported SFTP before only) and SSH tunnel support. The later feature is not that important for me but the first is really nice.
The changelog for WinSCP 4.0 beta lists a lot of bug fixes and changes that would be to much to list here at my site. Just take a look at the changelog at the official site if this is really interesting for you.
What do you use to connect to a dedicated server ? Remember that I’m still using Windows mainly which limits the choice of programs that I could use.
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I’m using WinSCP too for file transfers. Note that you have an option to launch Putty within WinSCP which is very handy. You just have to tell the path in the options.
I’m also using NX Client for remote desktop connection (my server is on Ubuntu), wich is really nice and fast. So cool that I mostly use the shell terminal on remote instead of Putty.
I use an scp client too, but I use the one that comes with cygwin. I load my key into my agent when I log into the machine, and from there on I’ve got password-less access to my servers. This is very handy as it means I don’t need to search through my password store to find what I the login details are for each host I want to connect to. It also means that I can turn off password authentication and avoid brute-force password attacks. I prefer bash (cygwin’s default shell) over cmd.exe and command.com, as it offers me better tab-completion and other handy features.