Connecting To Your Website

Dakota State University supports three different protocols for connecting to your student website.   FTP, and FTPS.   You can learn more about each of these protocols in the Web Server Specifications .

Generic Guides

	FTP	FTPS*
Windows
Mac
* Preferred Connection Protocol

Best Practices

Many web editing programs will allow you to edit your web site in "Live Mode" which allows any changes you make to your website to be published as soon as you hit the save button.  While this can be a convenient method to quickly make changes to your site, we recommend you edit a local copy(Local Mode) of your site and then publish it once you are finished making changes.  There are two main reasons we recommend using "Local Mode".  One, you will have a local copy of your website which can serve as a backup in the event of unexpected server issues.  Having that backup can be extremely important if an issue does arise if your website is being graded.  And two, editing in local mode ensures that if you make some changes to the local copy that breaks your website, you can easily restore to a good working copy by pulling down the files on the server.  Both of these reasons accomplish the same task, if something catastrophic happens to either the live or local copy, you can restore it from the other.