Forum Discussion
FTP is broken
Just to conclude this thread - it may be helpful to others in the future...
Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately Zen.co.uk don't support sFTP, so I can't tell whether that would have worked better. I also wasn't keen to start using a VPN, so I don't know whether that would have helped either.
Smarty seems to be great if you just need general web and email traffic, but there is something about their network (perhaps just the constantly changing IP addresses) that messes up secure FTP and makes logging into cpanel accounts a non-starter.
Three always worked great with FTP and cpanel, so I have just started a new contract with Three again, and, as expected, it work great now. So regrettably I am terminating my Smarty account - it's a pity but its just unusable for me.
Your understanding of dynamic IP addresses is correct. While you could argue that CG-NAT uses a dynamic IP address (in the sense that it's certainly not a static one), there are obviously more pitfalls than you'd get with a normal dynamic IP address.
Whether you would get the same problems with CPanel on other mobile networks, I'm not sure.. I guess it would depend if they change your external IP as frequently as Smarty do.
One possible solution for you is to do your web dev stuff over a VPN, so that your external IP (as seen by the FTP server and CPanel) remains the same for the duration of your session.
Just to conclude this thread - it may be helpful to others in the future...
Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately Zen.co.uk don't support sFTP, so I can't tell whether that would have worked better. I also wasn't keen to start using a VPN, so I don't know whether that would have helped either.
Smarty seems to be great if you just need general web and email traffic, but there is something about their network (perhaps just the constantly changing IP addresses) that messes up secure FTP and makes logging into cpanel accounts a non-starter.
Three always worked great with FTP and cpanel, so I have just started a new contract with Three again, and, as expected, it work great now. So regrettably I am terminating my Smarty account - it's a pity but its just unusable for me.
