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How to publish a site from Visual Studio using FTPS

This article describes how to publish a website from Visual Studio using FTPS. FTPS is a secure method of transferring files using the FTP protocol.

The following procedures are based on Visual Studio 2017. There may be minor differences between the instructions in this article and the steps required for other versions of Visual Studio.

Step 1: Obtain your FTP login credentials

Before you can publish files using FTPS, you must know the correct login credentials. To obtain the credentials for your account, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to the Customer Portal.
    If you do not know how to log in to the Customer Portal, please see this article.
  2. On the Services menu, click MY SERVICES:

  3. To the right of the destination hosting package, click Manage.
  4. The Hosting Information tab displays the login credentials for the account. Make a note of your username and password and server name.

Step 2: Configure Visual Studio

To configure Visual Studio for FTPS publishing, follow these steps:

  1. In Visual Studio, on the Build menu, click Publish project_name, where project_name represents the name of the project.
  2. On the Publish page, click the icon labeled IIS, FTP, etc.
  3. Click Publish.
  4. In the Publish dialog box, click the Connection tab if it is not already selected.
  5. In the Publish Method list box, select FTP:

    Text box showing selection of FTP option.

  6. In the Server text box, type the protocol, server domain name, and port:

    Text box showing server text box contents - ftps://example.com:990

    All versions of Visual Studio assume port 21 is the default port. You must specify port 990 in the Server text box for a successful connection.

  7. In the Site Path text box, type the file location where the site files should be stored. For the primary domain of an account, the path is /httpdocs but it could be any path that you have set up:

    Text box showing sample path - /httpdocs

  8. Select the Passive mode check box if it is not already selected:

    Check box showing passive mode selected.

  9. In the Username text box, type the FTP username:

    Text box showing example username

    Remember that you use a modified FTP username to log in to the Plesk FTP server. For example, if the FTP user in Plesk is kelly, and your account is on server a2ws3.a2hosting.com, then the FTP username is mi3-wss3\kelly.

  10. In the Password text box, type the password for the FTP user:

    Text box showing hidden password

  11. Optionally, select the Save password check box to save the password for future publishing:

    Checkbox showing save password selected

  12. Optionally, in the Destination URL text box, type the URL for the uploaded site:

    Text box showing sample destination URL - https://example.com

  13. Click Validate Connection. A green checkmark appears when validation is successful.
  14. Click Next.
  15. On the Settings tab, select any additional options that you want. None of the settings are required to continue.
  16. After making any desired settings, click Save.

  17. The FTPS upload begins immediately, and you can view progress in the Output panel.

    If you did not select the Save password option during configuration, you are prompted to type the password at connection time.
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