: Are there Hosting supporting protocol smarter than FTP? FTP is an incredible inefficient protocol. Just to compare if there are some differences on a website it makes thousand of calls to the

@Hamm4606531

You should look into WebDAV. It is based on HTTP, but does what FTP does. It has the advantage of being sessionless and can use SSL as well. Sessionless is good if the software or operating system is ever updated because it allows a load balancer on the server side to switch incoming requests between servers. With FTP, you have to break any existing sessions in order to update. In many situations, this makes WebDAV more reliable. WebDAV is also supported by most operating systems and many web site editors.

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@Martha676

I strongly disagree with bybe's opinion on the efficiencies of FTP and its suitability for managing files but the fact remains that it still persists as the lowest common denominator for maintaining files on a remote system across the internet.

Fortunately more providers are offering SSH and scp/sftp. However what you are asking for requires more functionality than is available with most protocols. But if you have SSH access and a recent/complete Unix system at the server, you may be able to run rsync which can compare file trees with some efficiency.

What you seem to aspire to is provided by some parallel filesystems (such as AFS) but I'm not aware of any provider offering these as a service.

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@Dunderdale272

SSH is a more powerful and more flexible protocol than FTP, it is also more secure. But to use it you have to know a little about the system you are accessing, usually Linux/Unix based systems.

You have to know that ssh is not a file transmission protocol but a communication protocol, this means you have a terminal where you can type any command that is available on the remote system.

There is the SFTP protocol which is a file transfer protocol based on SSH.

You also have commands like scp to copy files over the net using ssh.

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