Web Disk (also known as WebDav) is a cPanel implementation of the WebDav protocol. If you are using a cPanel web hosting, you can make use it to manage, upload, and download your website’s files as though they were local to your personal computer, just like copying files from one hard drive to another on your local machine. Check out these easy steps to setup Web Disk in cPanel. After that you will get the web disk address, account username, password, you can use these information to connect to your server from any supported platform and devices, such as Mac, Windows PC, Linux, Android devices, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch. In this guide, we will discuss how you can connect to Web Disk from a Windows 10 computer.
NOTE: In order for the Web Disk to work, you will need to configure your computer’s firewall to allow the following ports. You do not have to check whether they are blocked or not in advance, try to connect the cPanel web disk from PC you will see.
- Port 2078 (SSL)
- Port 2077 (this is for Clear Text (Not Encrypted) transfer, not recommended!)
Connect to cPanel Web Disk from Windows 10 PC – the easier way!
Log in your hosting control panel, go to cPanel home >> Files >> Web Disk, you can then find, manage, add web disk account there. Find the web disk account you have created, click the “Access Web Disk” link to open the page where you can find connection instructions for various devices and platforms. To connect to Web Disk from a Windows 10 PC, choose Microsoft Operating Systems… and select Windows 8 from the drop-down list, you will then find specific instructions to access web disk from Windows computer at the lower section of the same page. cPanel has not updated this OS selection list to include instructions for Windows 10 yet. However based on our test, the same instructions can be applied to both Windows 8 and Windows 10.
You will find two different method to setup web disk on Windows 10: automatic setup and manual setup. We recommend the auto setup to dummies who the easier solution.
Step 1. Click the link to save the script file from cPanel to your computer. It is a VBScript Script in .vbs format.
Step 2. Double click on the downloaded script to run on your PC, it will create a shortcut to the web disk on your computer desktop; meanwhile a login prompt pops up, enter your Web Disk username and password to log in, then you will open your web disk folder in File Manager on your computer.
You can enable the ‘remember my password‘ option, so when you connect to web disk again in the future, simply click the web disk shortcut on your computer desktop to directly access files and folders saved on your web disk without the need for authentication.
You can also follow the ‘Manual Connection Instructions‘ to setup the Web Disk client on your Windows 10 computer. cPanel has the very specific instructions so we will not get into the details here.
Connecting to Web Disk – the security concern
Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 require Digest Authentication support to be enabled in order to access your Web Disk over a clear text/unencrypted connection. However we do not recommend connecting to Web Disk with No SSL for the security concern. In our opinion, you should only make an SSL connection over port 2078 and you do not need to enable Digest Authentication on Windows or have 2077 port allowed. Most web hosting services should offer you free SSL link for secure data transfer.
When you create a Web Disk in cPanel, it will be a sub-folder under the public_html directory which is however a public directory. People can use your domain name to access this web disk folder from web or web browser. If you do not want the files that you upload to that directory to be publicly accessible, you can follow this guide to set a password to protect directories on server.
Connect to server via Web Disk VS FTP
cPanel Web Disk works similar to FTP, alternatively you can also connect to FTP server via File Manager in Windows without the need for a FTP client software on your computer. After that your web server will be added as a network drive on your PC, you can access it just like your local hard drives. This makes file uploading from computer to server or file downloading from server to computer like you copy files from one drive to another on your PC.
You can also go one step further with the downloaded script and mount the drive to your Windows 10 as a network drive.
1. Right click on the downloaded Web Disk script
2. Click on “Map network drive…”
3. Select the drive letter you want (I chose J:)
4. Log in
That’s it.