You can sign up for a remote backup server when you order a godaddy hosting service, and it does sound a good idea considering it should keep your data safe. You can only access the data on the FTP server from within the Godaddy network – stopping any outside access.

When Plesk attempts to connect to a remote FTP server, it first tries to place a file on the server – which is a no-go if the server is full. This fails of course, so you can’t even get a directory listing of the remote server through Plesk.

Easy solution though – connect to your server through SSH and then use commands to connect to the remote FTP through your server.

1. Open your SSH application of choice (we use PuTTY, available free from greenend.org.uk) and connect to your server. Use your main IP address or your hostname (domain name), depending on what your host supports. For dedicated servers from Godaddy, either can be used.
2. Once you’ve logged in with your root username and password, simply enter
   

   FTP XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX (where xxx…. is the IP address of the FTP server) and hit enter.
   then your login username, hit enter and then your login password (also followed by enter). For Godaddy all of this is available in your Server Management Area.

3. Now you should be logged on to the server. Type DIR and hit enter to produce a list of the directory contents. This also shows file sizes and other details.
   1. You can DELETE individual files on the server using the DELETE command. For example, to delete info.php use DELETE info.php and hit enter.
   2. To change directories type CD directoryname/ and hit enter.
   3. To copy a file to your local server type WGET filename.file and hit enter. If you don’t specify a directory then the file will be copied to your server in the /root/ directory. You can access this directory by connecting to your server using PuTTY and typing DIR and hitting enter when you’ve logged in. (It will be in the default directory).

That’s a basic guide, there are many better out there but this follows the basics. There are a couple of useful SSH commands on this site, including how to set specific options.