FrontPage Server Extensions allow applications like Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Expression Web or Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer to communicate with your hosting account. These programs are HTML editors and allow you to create a site locally on your computer and then upload them to your web hosting account.  They also allow you to make changes to you live site directly but this is not a good practice as it will create errors on your live site.

All this sounds interesting until the stuff behind the scenes is revealed.

• They use HTTP protocol for communications which is open text and is not secure at all
• Microsoft stopped supporting them in 2006

These two reasons should be good enough to not use them, especially that there are very good alternatives like WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) which is an extension of HTTP or FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Although, these are still insecure but they are much more stable alternatives to FronPage Extensions. We recommend using FTP as it’s fast, reliable and should be available with any hosting account.

Here’s what one of our customers had to say after switching to FTP.

“This is great, Expressions Web is just as good as FrontPage if not better, ftp is just as good as http if not better, and I can now retire the old computer.”

Using HTML editors is still an old way of doing things. If you want to have an easy and secure secure way to manage your site, there are online site manager applications like WordPress that are much more powerful and have a lot of different features.