Files generating odd URLs

This is a two-part question, but I’ll ask them together because they might be related.

After uploading files (.mp3) using cPanel, I tried to open the file. I needed the URL so I could link to it from a blog post. The file won’t open in cPanel at all. First I get an HTML 401 error, then, after logging in, I get an HTML 404 error. Why is this happening?

Well, I tried to answer my own question…but ended up with another question.

I set up Cyberduck and tried to get the URL for my file that way. I found it, but it looks like this: http://ftp.pynchoninpublic.com/… I can get it to work by simply deleting the ‘ftp’ part of the URL, but why is the link generating in this fashion? (As a note, all of the .mp3 files I’ve upload generate the same weird URL.)

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

I would take a look at this article which will explain how the folders in your account relate to URLs on the web. Programs like Cyberduck and the File Manager are only going to be used to upload files to your account, they don’t have any realization of what domain and URL the files should be loaded from. But once you know that public_html is the main domain and folders off of it are separated by forward slashes you can make sense of the URLs (the article gives a few examples of how the URLs are structures, just remember the server is case sensitive so we recommend no spaces, special characters, or capital letters to make the filenames easier).

Okay thanks. I think I got it.

I don’t need to worry about the thing where the URL adds an ‘ftp’ in there? Like I said, I got the URL to work, following the structure in the article you pointed me toward. But I just want to double-check that that’s not an issue.

Web-based URLs will always be http:// or https://. Cyberduck is probably using ftp:// because it’s an FTP program so that’s the “language” it speaks but only someone with FTP access would be able to load a file from a URL like that whereas the public URL could be loaded on the web by anyone.

Right. That was my assumption, but I wanted to check. Thank you again for being so prompt and helpful.