SFTP

At Files.com, we are one of the largest providers of cloud-based SFTP in the world. SFTP is extremely popular for business to business integration, and we are proud to support it fully.

With that said, SFTP suffers from major performance limitations at the protocol level. Additionally, corporate firewalls commonly interfere with SFTP traffic.

SFTP should be used where required, such as for business-to-business integration via applications and processes that specifically require SFTP.

For file transfers where performance is a consideration, we strongly recommend you instead prefer our direct integrations, such as our Desktop, Mobile, and Web apps, SDKs, API, and Command Line app. Please visit our Preferred Apps For File Transfer page to learn about and download the Files.com native apps as an alternative to SFTP.

Our article on Maximizing SFTP Performance describes how to make SFTP as performant as possible.

Files.com operates a proprietary SFTP server software that we build and maintain in-house using our full-time employees. We are one of the largest providers of cloud-based SFTP in the world and our SFTP software has been in production use for almost 15 years.

The Files.com SFTP server is hosted in 7 geographic regions and is deployed as a highly available service within each region. This means that there is no single SFTP server you connect to; your requests are served by a pool of servers in each region.

Files.com's SFTP server also supports the SCP protocol, another file transfer protocol that is built on top of SSH. For purposes of most interactions with Files.com, SCP will work exactly the same as SFTP.

Functionality is restricted to only SFTP and SCP capabilities. This means that only the file transfer related capabilities of SSH are allowed, such as using SFTP or SCP to transfer files, and SSH Keys for authentication.

There are no other SSH services provided. SSH capabilities such as shell access or SSH tunneling are unavailable, preventing their use in any way.

Security scans will detect SSH availability as a "false positive" result. This is because SFTP and SCP are subsets of SSH functionality. No SSH capabilities, other than those required by SFTP and SCP, are available on the Files.com platform.

Files.com supports setting a custom root folder on a per-user basis, and it will apply only to FTP connections (and optionally also SFTP connections), but not anywhere else such as the web, mobile, or desktop app.

This is meant for applications that are unable to change directories appropriately in order to look in the right place for files.

This setting is not a security setting and does not restrict the user from accessing other folders via mechanisms other than FTP. You should use Permissions to set access controls on a per folder basis.

To change this setting for a user, type Users in the search box at the top of each page and then click on the matching result. Edit the desired user and click on the Other Connections section to locate the FTP/SFTP client root folder setting.

If set, Files.com will act as if the selected folder is the root folder for any given FTP session.

This setting may also be applied to SFTP connections. To enable this, type "SFTP client root folders" in the search box at the top of every page and then click on the matching result. Update the SFTP client root folders toggle.

Our SFTP service includes the ability to configure a welcome message, also known as the Message Of The Day (MOTD), to users. The message will be shown to users when they first connect to Files.com using the SFTP protocol.

To configure the message, type "Custom message of the day" in the search box at the top of every page and then click on the matching result. Scroll to the setting Custom message of the day (MOTD), select Edit, enter the plain text of your message, check the Show message to users connecting via SFTP checkbox, and select Save.