Switch your FTP blog to the new Blogger

Last week we added FTP publishing to the new Blogger in beta. Today we’re letting you switch your FTP-publishing blog from the current Blogger to the new Blogger in beta. If you’re eligible to switch your account (see restrictions), you’ll see a message on your Dashboard inviting you to do so.

As with everything else on the new version of Blogger, we expect that FTP publishing will be more reliable than it is on current Blogger. Nevertheless, there many variables in external publishing that are out of our control, so we can’t guarantee that Blogger will publish flawlessly to every hosting provider.

We can say that we’ve tested the new version’s FTP publishing with the four most popular hosting providers from current Blogger, and it works fine. In particular, we’ve worked with Your-Site to ensure that the recent publishing problems between current Blogger and their service are not present with the new version of Blogger.

We do recommend that, before you switch, you create an account on the new version of Blogger by signing in with a Google Account at http://beta.blogger.com/. Try creating a test blog there and verifying that it can publish to your hosting provider. You can then switch your current Blogger blog to this Google Account. Or, just ask around on the Blogger Help Group to find out if other people have had success publishing to your particular hosting provider.

If publishing to your hosting provider does not work — especially if it did work with the current Blogger — send a message to Blogger Support. We want to fix all FTP publishing problems that we are able to.

Extra tip: ask your hosting provider if they support SFTP. If they do, you should use it instead of FTP. It’s more secure than FTP and we’ve found that it will often work when FTP does not.