With support and upgrades, a 1-year license costs $60 a barebones license without support costs $35. So Ipswitch came up with WS_FTP Home, an FTP utility that’s less expensive and easier to use.
The company recently figured out that its WS_FTP Professional was a bit too heavy-duty for non-technical folks into digital photography, MP3 file-swapping and Web publishing. Ipswitch claims a massive installed base of more than 40 million. The emergence of Windows and the Web made me forget all about FTP until recently, when I checked out a product from Ipswitch aimed at consumers and small businesses that move around a lot of large files. But that required either a greater mastery of Unix, or more helpful co-workers. Upon subscribing to Usenet groups in 1989, I noticed some users wrote casually of “FTPing” files to each other.Ĭurious, I badgered co-workers to show me how to use this mysterious File Transfer Protocol.