Okay, I am a newbie to setting up servers and working with them. I followed the tutorial "The Perfect Server - Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon 7.1" to set up the server. My question is: what is the difference between using FTP and using SSH? Doesn't SSH use a type of FTP protocol? If this is the case can't I use PUTTY on a client computer to access the server to run commands and transfer files? And if that is the case why do I need to have ProFTPD installed on my system? Let me know please. Thanks for all help that I've have received thus far on these forums.
You can use SSH to transfer files (the command is scp); in SSH all data (incl. passwords) is encrypted whereas in FTP it's unencrypted which is not very secure. But to use SSH/scp, the users must have a shell account which is insecure if you don't know/trust your users, whereas FTP works without shell access.
So do I really need to use ProFTPD? I installed PUTTY on a client computer and was able to get into my server so that I could browse and edit files (via vi editor) which is what I wanted to be able to do. I haven't tried using the scp command yet. But I (the administrator) will be the only one that would be getting in via SSH and using the scp to transfer/edit files. Is ProFTPD easier? If so, how do I go about setting it up and using it? Also, I do want to create a page where users have to login then they can upload files. How would I go about creating that page? Thanks for all help.
Sounds like you don't need FTP setup. Using SSH/SCP you can use an FTP client like Filezilla to connect via SSH/SCP to upload files if you need to. This is a very secure way of doing things and is not really much different than a standard FTP connection other than its all encrypted. If you just want to shell in and edit files in the shell that is when you'd use putty. As for a web page to allow users to upload you will either need to write a custom script (Perl or PHP are the most common) or download something prebuilt (sorry I don't know of any off hand but I'm sure there are plenty out there). The only time you would want FTP is like Falko said: when you have users you don't fully trust (and I mean fully!). Otherwise FTP is likely the weak point of your server and the most likely thing to get exploited.
