Updating from inside WP

Your hostname isn’t your url it’s the name of the server your wordpress is hosted on. Sometimes it will be your top level domain name ie karstenjensen.dk most likely though it will be localhost

Hi Jeremy,

I’m not sure I understand your answer. I now have tried inserting “localhost” instead of karstenjensen.dk/blog – but now it wont accept my username and password.

I’m not quite sure what to write in the hostname. My username is also admin in the dashbord – althoug I changed the origin admin to something else.

Can you please help me?

Your hostname is “karstenjensen.dk”. Not “karstenjensen.dk/blog”.

Have you ever used an FTP program to connect to your site? Well, the “hostname” is the name of the site that you connect to.

The username and password is the one you use for FTP, not the WordPress username and password.

Hi Otto,

Yes I have often used to connect to my site with a FTP-program and here I have no problems. But it still does not work for me when doing it inside WP.

For connecting to my site via FTP I have to use karstenjensen.dk/web to connect – but that does not work either. Have tried using karstenjensen.dk/blog – karstenjensen.dk/web/blot also but no luck.

I have tried “all kinds” of passwords and usernames. And it does not work with the settings of any kind – neither the settings I’m using in my FTP-client.

For connecting to my site via FTP I have to use karstenjensen.dk/web to connect

That doesn’t make any sense. You can’t connect to “karstenjensen.dk/web” because that is not a hostname.

A hostname is the name of a server. It does not have a path to a directory attached to it.

A hostname is just the host’s name. www.ads-software.com or example.com or any of these is the hostname.

My host provider tells me it is karstenjensen.dk/web I have to upload in – that’s what I’m doing when using a FTP client.

What am I doing wrong?

that’s what I’m doing when using a FTP client.

No, you don’t, because that doesn’t make any actual sense.

When you ftp to a site, you connect to a SITE. As in, you connect to google.com or www.ads-software.com or karstenjensen.dk. These are hosts. There are all hostnames. They don’t have any /web after them. That’s a directory, it is not part of the hostname.

When you use an FTP client, you first connect to some site. Then you navigate to some directory. Then you upload your files. WordPress doesn’t need to know the directory. It need to know the SITE. As in the HOSTNAME. What site do you connect to?

Read here for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname

And if you can’t figure it out, then my advice would be to find somebody nearby who can help you and show you what you’re doing wrong, or to forget it entirely and upload your plugins manually.

My host tells me that when uploading a webpage on my server I have to use the the folder “web” (karstenjensen.dk/web) for uploading.

When using my ftp-client I’m using the path https://www.karstenjensen.dk/web – and it works fine. But I would much rather be able to do the updates from inside WordPress….

Well, as written earlier I have also tried just using karstenjensen.dk – https://www.karstenjensen.dk https://www.karstenjensen.dk etc. with my username and password as given to me from my host – but it still does not work.

It simply can not be true I’m not able to do so.

I have no idea what kind of wacky ftp client would accept that, however it remains incorrect no matter what you think.

The “hostname” would be https://www.karstenjensen.dk. Period, end of discussion. If that fails to work, then it probably is never going to work. Sorry. Update manually instead.

I have just tested in my ftp-client (TotalCommander) – and I can easily connect to https://www.karstenjensen.dk via ftp. But when uploading to my web-page my web-host tells me that the remote directory is called https://www.karstenjensen.dk/web – and that is where my WP, etc., is.

But I guess it still does not make sense that I can not use the inside update in WordPress – right?

Karsten, I and a lot of other people are/were having the exact same problem as you were. Here is a post with a few solutions/workarounds.

The solution that worked for me was changing my host to read: localhost:21 and keeping my standard FTP username password. Hope that helps.

Boy, was Otto ever being a sourpuss – and completely ignoring the fact that many web hosts set a clients FTP path to a set folder within their hostname, thereby bypassing all the cgi-bin, awstats, etc that they could inadvertently mess with. Why not simply explain that to the next person who has this confusion, instead of jumping up and down yelling “wrong! wrong! wrong!”