Free Azure FTPS Server with 1GB of Space
While we don’t often need an FTP server these days, when you need one, you need one.
Azure Cloud is our default cloud provider for all of our projects, though we also occasionally use AWS and Google Cloud. Naturally, these were the first few places we checked, hoping they’d have a low-cost (if not free) managed FTP service.
Of the three, only AWS has one out of the box — AWS Transfer Family. Sadly, it adds up to about $40/month to run (or thereabout). Not too bad, but feels too much just for a place to drop a few files once in a while.
So, we’ve looked around for some other SaaS/PaaS FTP offerings: Couchdrop, Files.com, etc. Sadly, again, all of them also seem to cost around $30–40/month (at the minimum) to operate.
Then, we came across an Azure SFTP Creation Template that seems to take care of all the dirty plumbing for an SFTP server, all within our favorite Azure. The template uses a Linux container to host an SFTP server. This seemed almost perfect, until we calculated how much it would cost to operate it: about $40/month again!
We almost caved-in and signed-up for one of these services. Granted, some of them are definitely worth the expense with all the FTP management features they provide: connections into cloud file storage, granular multi-user controls, upload portals, etc — all very useful stuff when you’re dealing with complicated data exchange scenarios, but nothing barebones that’s cheap & simple.
This is when it dawned on us: Azure App Service instances automatically expose an FTPS access to their application and data files (for deployment purposes and maybe some other reasons). And, the best part is that you can spin-up a free-tier App Service for free, with 1GB of space.
This is plenty enough for our current use-case. Though, if we needed more space, we could choose the first paid plan at $13/month and get 10GB of space. (If we had higher space or multi-user access needs, we’d probably go with one of the third-party paid services.)
So, how do you set this up and access the FTPS? Pretty simple:
- Create a new App Service using either an F1 (free, 1GB) or B1 ($13/month, 10GB) service plan:
2. Open the newly created App Service and browse to its Deployment Center > FTPS credentials to get the URL and access credentials:
3. Use the URL and credentials to access the FTPS either programmatically or with FileZilla FTP client. That’s it!
This resource describes the folder and file structure of an Azure App Service. In summary, it’s probably best to store the files in a new subfolder, and definitely outside the wwwroot folder that’s exposed to the Internet.
This approach to standing up an FTP server will probably satisfy many simple but common needs, for free or at minimal cost. For the more complex scenarios, managed FTP services are well worth their price.
