Hosting - What are FTP accounts?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Its a method for transferring files over the Internet.

Hosting companies allow you to setup FTP accounts so that visitors can access a certain part of your site only and upload/download files.

Why bother using FTP accounts? Good question. Lets say you offered site visitors a large 5MB ebook for free. What you do is create an FTP account, upload the ebook to this account, then provide visitors with details on how they can download the ebook using FTP (much faster and reliable method of downloading from the Internet).