Best for website, filezilla client or server?

Since your hosting is the server, to make download or upload of your files to your hosting you need use filezilla client to connect. ??

yeah i don’t think you understood my question, but it’s ok because i just figured out my hosting account has a file manager, which is all i need.

I think kosonome understood what you meant ?? FTP is a much easier and bs free solution to uploading/downloading your site files. Hostgator is good and the file manager is okay, but you’ll greatly appreciate setting up your FTP (filezilla) client. In the time it takes you to upload 10 files using hostgator’s file manager, you can already be working on your site having uploaded with filezilla. It’s lightning speed faster than the file manager, and that is why ftp is better than file manager. You can edit on the computer and send them right up.

And your client or the server – the ftp client logs into the server and loads the files. So does file manager.

Filezilla is easy (and free) to set up. Launch FZ, select File/Site Manager, select New Site, and in these fields add your information (hostgator supplies this information in your registration confirmation email):

Host: yourdomain.com/net/org/etc
FTP: File Transfer Protocol selected
Encryption: default: use plain ftp
Logon Type: normal
Account: hostgator acct user id
pw: hostgator password
Ok
Connect

The left side is your computer’s file manager…click through and find the location of the content you want uploaded.
The right side is the server/file manager…click through there to the root folder or desired folder you want the content.
On the left side, select everything you want to upload and hit the upload button, or right click and select upload.
3 seconds later, you’re all done.

Think of it as a side to side transfer – local on the left, site host on the right, find it, send it over.

File manager is conceptually more a top/bottom kind of transfer. You go up to the hosting site into the folder you want stuff to come to. Then select upload and it opens the same file manager as in ftp – you select the stuff and click upload…and up it goes.

Same difference, only FTP clients are 100x faster.

FTP is faster, and also it loads larger files.

The file manager offered by a host is great for general things. Basic file uploads, unarchiving zip files, organizing, renaming, etc.

FTP is more full featured, allowing better control of file permissions,.

A file manager will often flake out on large uploads. So if you are trying to work with larger files, stick to FTP. But I do the majority of my work with my host file manager for conveniance

Thank you Stacey for your insightful answer. I like HG’s file manager because its easy to copy files from a parent to a child theme, which are steps i haven’t been able to figure out yet on filezilla.

Cheers