Setting up FTP on EC2 Windows Instances

Configuring FTP to a running Amazon AWS EC2 Windows instance without an elastic IP.

In this article i am going to configure Filezilla FTP Server on a Amazon AWS EC2 Windows instance.

Loginto your Amazon AWS Management Console and select EC2 . Once the instance is accessible, we will need to change some settings:

In AWS, select “Security Groups” from the left-hand menu.

Select the name of the security group for the instance you just created

In the window at the bottom of the screen select the “Inbound” tab from the small frame.

Pick “Custom TCP Rule” from the “Create a new rule” dropdown.

Enter 50000-51000 in the port range field.

In the source field, use discretion. Leaving the field at 0.0.0.0/0 will allow all. 

(That may be ok depending on your intended use, I’m using it as a disposable server, so I’m not going to get into security in this article.)

Select “Add Rule” and the “Apply Rule Changes” (Make sure you do both!!!).

Now repeat the steps  for port 21.

Finally you can see the inbound rules on the right side

The second step is to setup FileZilla Server. 

Install FileZilla Server on the Amazon Instance and create a FTP user with password.

Click the settings icon on the interface.

On the general settings tab, “Listen on these ports:” will be defaulted to 21. Just leave it.

Select the “Passive mode settings” from the tree on the left.

Place a check mark next to “Use custom port range” and set the port range to “50000-51000”.

Now get your “Public DNS Name” from the Amazon AWS console. Your IP address will be in the Public DNS Name, .

Enter the IP into the “Use the Following IP” field on FileZilla’s “Passive mode settings” screen.

Now we are at the final step. You will now need to adjust the Windows Firewall settings to allow the ports we allowed in the AWS Security Group.

And you are done! Go ahead and connect with your favorite FTP client.