FTP Upload
As a web developer, you would need no introduction to the File Transfer Protocol. One often overlooked factor about FTP is that it is totally insecure. Usernames and passwords are sent by the client to the server in the plain text. Similarly the file data is also transferred with out any form of encryption. Fortunatley the security issues can be resolved quite easily by opting to use FTP+SSL or SFTP instead of FTP. (It should be noted that despite the similiarity in names SFTP is very different from FTP)
The advantages of using FTP for file uploads is that you do not need to have a server side handler script as you do with HTTP uploads. That usually means the transfers are slightly faster than with an HTTP POST, and consume less memory and CPU cycles on the server.
