They are not confused. A lot of companies still use FTP internally and for B2B. Many people would be very uncomfortable if they knew how much companies including banks, payment systems, etc... and governments still depended on FTP and clear text authentication. That's even before broaching the subject of which of the applications and daemons in use are being actively maintained.
Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.
FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).
> SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access.
Security-wise you set it not to run commands (and maybe chroot) and you're done, right? And difficulty-wise isn't granting SSH access very similar to FTP access?
Fair point, but I would assume the AWS S3 by itself is bigger than the FTP/SFTP traffic globally including banks. No idea if it’s true, and I’m not sure we can get reliable stats on this
SFTP? Don't confuse it with FTP or FTPS - SFTP is a different protocol which runs on top of SSH.
They are not confused. A lot of companies still use FTP internally and for B2B. Many people would be very uncomfortable if they knew how much companies including banks, payment systems, etc... and governments still depended on FTP and clear text authentication. That's even before broaching the subject of which of the applications and daemons in use are being actively maintained.
What do you mean, "for what it’s useful for"? For me, WebDAV has replaced FTP where SFTP hasn't.
Has that caught on? I last used it 15 years ago and it was great but I haven't seen it anywhere
like in enterprise? the browsers stopped shipping with ftp support I think 5 years ago.
Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.
FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).
> SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access.
Security-wise you set it not to run commands (and maybe chroot) and you're done, right? And difficulty-wise isn't granting SSH access very similar to FTP access?
I don't understand the issue.
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You might be surprised to learn there are dedicated ftp clients.
sarcasm?
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HTTPS has largely replaced it. Pretty much all files uploaded or downloaded from the internet is going to be done via HTTPS and not FTP.
Only if you ignore the banking industry.
Fair point, but I would assume the AWS S3 by itself is bigger than the FTP/SFTP traffic globally including banks. No idea if it’s true, and I’m not sure we can get reliable stats on this